re: What happened in 1998? Why the collapse?

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DiNardo was an excellent coach who built LSU back up, but his ego was too big and he could not admit when he was wrong.

Made some VERY bad assistant hires and refused to correct them.

He left Saban a very solid roster.

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Good info, but I made one correction. IIRC, his last year he hired a first time OC who had such a simple offense that the opposing defenses were correctly calling out the plays just based on personnel and formation.
In addition, there was no depth on the team in DiNardo's last few years. He had good signing classes, but many of them didn't make it to campus or dropped out. In addition, he worked the players to hard during the week so that injuries and fatigue began to add up to an already depleted roster as the season wore on. One good thing about DiNardo----he successfully recruited Kevin Faulk to LSU.