Quote :LSU is responsible for Saban's success every bit as much as Saban is responsible for LSU's. Saban would not be where he is today if he was puddling around in East lansing for another 5 years. LSu gave him the opportunity and all the resources in the world to establish himself, including a roster with a plethora of talent he inherited from Dinardo. I always found it odd that Saban gets 100% of the credit for the players he coached that were signed and recruited by Dinardo but Les seemed to get 0% of the players signed by Saban but coached by him. The hypocrisy of it all is astounding. And still, 10 years later, we have slapdicks saying LSU's success rests squarely on the shoulders of Nick Saban. Give me a fricking break. How well did that work out for Ron Zook at Florida, Will Muschamp at Florida, Larry Coker at Miami, Frank Solich at Nebraska, Bob Davie at Notre Dame, and so on and so forth. Yes, Nick Saban is a great coach, probably the best in the country and one of the best of all time, but to continue to act like LSU is what it is because of him, 10 years later, is such a joke. People seem to think Saban was as good as he is now when he was at LSU. He wasn't. Let us all be reminded that he had exactly one season at LSU where he lost fewer than 3 games.

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Posted by Ace Midnight

Between sanity and madness

Member since Dec 2006

89697 posts

Posted on 6/28/14 at 7:27 am to PEABODY32

quote:
including a roster with a plethora of talent he inherited from Dinardo.

Sabanistas act as if the cupboard was bare - in fact that is far more true of when Dinardo took over, than when Saban took over. Dinardo righted the ship from a fundamental standpoint and, above all else, got LSU fans to believe we could win again. First season, we lose the opener at aTm (again) - and comfortably handle MSU in Starkville. The home opener was the Bring Back the Magic game. The rest was history.

Wins over ranked Auburn and Arkansas, as well as a respectable showing against Bama in 1995 set the stage for 1996, only the third 10-win season since 1958. 1997 saw us beat Florida - ending a 9-game winning streak for them in the series, as well as a win over Notre Dame in the Indy Bowl, after losing to them in the regular season. We also crushed Bama in T-Town, 27-0.

1998 was one of those weird seasons - looks terrible on paper - 4-7, 2-6 in conference, but looking at the losses - 27-28 to UGA, 36-39 to Kentucky, 31-37 (OT) @ Ole Miss, 36-39 @ Notre Dame - as few as 12 points could have flipped all 4 of those. While Florida and Arkansas handled us fairly easily, we only lost by 6 to Bama.

I'm not going to defend 1999, but it wasn't because the program was on bad footing or lacked talent at that point - there were off-the-field problems, and we had a terrible defensive coordinator to whom Dinardo was loyal to a fault.

So all that building up that Dinardo did from virtually zero.

To Saban's credit he definitely built upon that and his particular focus was infrastructure/facility improvements. But to pretend that he came into a program that had not been significantly rebuilt by Dinardo after a decade of losing - for perspective, LSU had gone 43-46-1 over the 8 seasons prior to Dinardo, and he went a very serviceable 32-24-1 over 5 seasons.

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