re: Probably Germans...but McElroy says Saban responsible for LSU Success

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

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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.