re: If Coach O returns, will Derek Ponamsky be back as well?

Yep and for some reason idiots love him. O destroyed this program and they want him back.

Can the rant take Coach O returning after all the badmouthing that went on.

Hi, Derek. I don't think you will be welcome back.

Bro, 2019 was the greatest season ever. In the entire sport! You gotta at least give coach o some credit for putting the people together who actually made that happen.

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ironic how ADs are not part of that arcane society and keep handing out ridiculous one-sided coaching contracts like Halloween candy

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The in-demand coaches have leverage. If you want them, agree to their terms. If not, go find someone no one else wants and hope for the best. But the AD who does that and fails likely gets his own walking papers.

Now, the unnecessary extensions, like Oregron, a guy who had ZERO market outside of LSU, received are a different discussion.

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The college football world, those involved professionally, not fans, know how little Orgeron actually had to do with that season.

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Meh. I have no gauge for how the college football world views his contributions to that team, but I think a lot of our own fans, such as yourself, dismiss his contributions much too easily. He may have done it differently, may not have been as hands on with the Xs and Os like a Kirby Smart or Nick Saban. But he deserves a lot more credit than people give him.

He recruited the most players. And I worried that he wouldn’t be able to do that at the level that he did. It’s one thing to be a great recruiter as a staff member recruiting for another HC who was more highly respected and had skins on the wall. I thought it would be a huge challenge to recruit for himself with the only HC stint on his resume being his Ole Miss failure. But he surprised me by leaning into his wild man, crazy Cajun caricature persona he’d created, and it worked, especially on Louisiana kids. (More on that later). His recruiting, with his lack of previous success, was actually really impressive.

He also put that staff together, whether that was hiring new guys or retaining some already on Les’s staff. It doesn’t matter how much money we paid them, no good assistant with options is going to go work for a terrible HC and bad boss. The “proof” of that is in Dave Aranda sticking around for 3 full seasons under O. He saw Ed coach the remaining Don to the ‘16 season after Les was fired. He could had his pick of DC jobs after that year. But he stuck around to work for O.

Aranda always wanted to be a HC and I don’t think he solely concerned with just coaching the defense. He wanted to learn from as many HCs as possible to prepare himself when he was ready. So there was obviously something he thought he could learn from O—probably more recruiting, how to relate to players, motivation type things than anything football related. But he would have left if he didn’t see any value in watching O run a program. Just like he did with Les. I bet he took things from both those guys that he implemented at Baylor.

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The proof is that you have a NC winning coach whose team was one of the best in CFB history and has been available to coach for 4 years...and NO ONE (at least no major conf. program) has expressed any serious interest

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Again, meh. That’s not proof of anything regarding Ed’s contributions to that 2019 team.
He had very public off the field scandals, including a picture of himself laying in bed with a young blonde woman that circulated all over the internet. That made him toxic at the time, but it logically had nothing to due with his contributions to the 2019 one way or another. That’s just retconning to create a narrative that didn’t exist 2 years earlier.

And Urban Meyer hasn’t had any serious public interest from any big time programs after his scandals and disastrous tenure at Jacksonville. And he won 3 NCs at 2 different schools. On top of that, we’re still paying Orgeron his buyout. If he had gotten another job, that would have been offset. He probably didn’t WANT another job. It’s no coincidence that he’s popped up recently and thrown his name around just as his LSU’s payments are about to expire.

Finally, back to his Crazy Cajun cartoon character. Almost always, that “one of us” nonsense doesn’t matter at all. I think Orgeron was the exception. He leaned into it and was able to leverage it to get recruits and a lot of the fanbase behind him. His strengths uniquely qualified him for the LSU job specifically. It wouldn’t have worked the same at any other school in the country. He was the best HC he could possibly be at LSU. The exact same human being couldn’t have had the same success at any other program. THAT’S what the rest of the college football world know and still knows.

And they know his style and strengths have a short self life and can’t be sustained. You can only rip off your shirt and punch yourself in the jaw so many times before it loses its power. But again, that doesn’t take away from what he did in 2019. It’s not related at all.

You can say he’s a bad head coach. That he’d be a bad hire for any school looking for someone to give them sustained success. You can even say he’s a bad hire for any school looking for ANY success. And you’d likely be right. But that is irrelevant, has nothing to do with, and doesn’t logically take away from the fact that he was really good in ‘18 and great in ‘19 under those particular circumstances, with those particular players, with that particular staff, in that particular season.

Again, I don’t think it’s possible for him to replicate anything resembling that again. The stars aligned. And he helped make them align. And took full advantage of that alignment. How much credit he gets can certainly be debated. But to say he had nothing to do with it and was “just along for the ride” is not just wrong, it’s intellectually dishonest. He was there. It happened. He did it. We watched it.

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frick “O”!. If they bring him back I hope LSU never ever wins another game.

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Sad!

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Yep and for some reason idiots love him.

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Edwin (“Vote for the Crook”) Edwards was elected to 4 terms as governor of this state. Once because he and David fricking Duke came out of the primaries.

I’ll just leave that there.

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