re: What was the Smoke Laval era like?

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Smoke is a great baseball guy. Very knowledgeable, a great evaluator of talent (was a scout for the Braves last I heard), and an excellent teacher. Some guys just aren’t cut out to run a major program. Smoke is one of those guys.

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This is probably the most accurate post in this entire thread.

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Loved them, wish like hell I could find a fitted one now without all the other stupid shite on the side of them.

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What size are you?

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Smoke followed Skip and didn’t win a National Championship. That’s his sin.

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Didn’t win a single game in Omaha in FIVE YEARS! It was a lot worse than “didn’t win a championship”, and it had a clear four year trend line downward.

It showed us being at LSU is different than anywhere else.

Skip I think wanted at first to hire his former assistant that had gone to Bama, can't remember his name, but if I recall the story at the time - Skip still wanted a good portion of "the camp money" so that guy backed out and Smoke was willing to let Skip keep that so Smoke got the gig.

Made 2 straight CWS his second and third year, but was 2 and through in both - then lost in the regional, then in his fifth year did not even make the tourney and was fired?

They say he spent a lot of time at Sammy's.

Smoke didn't understand how to recruit at a big time program. We ended up with about the same talent he had a ULM. He would go after and sign way too many players that had virtually no chance of ever hitting campus. We had very highly ranked recruiting classes every year, but none of the top players ever came here. Skip, Paul and JJ always sign a few of these guys that they think there is some chance of getting them here.

I was a kid and loved those teams. JC Holt still one of my all time favorite tigers.

It was a lot like the Deboer era at Alabama right now. Smoke won games and made it to the "playoffs" each of his first 4 seasons. Two of which were CWS appearances. That would have been great at about 99% of programs. But when the "standard" is 5 national championships in 10 years that's not seen as "good enough". That's why it only took one bad season for him to be shown the door

Didn’t Smoke try to frick LSU over baseball camp money on his way out the door?

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Didn’t Smoke try to frick LSU over baseball camp money on his way out the door?

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Wow. It took 5 pages before two people brought out the real answer.

Skip stayed at LSU as AD. That put him into position to retain the camp money, which at the time, was a significant amount of his annual money. In his defense, Skip did build that camp and still coached at it. I’m not saying I blame him for keeping it, but allowances should have been made for the income of any incoming HC.

Smoke was also not really HC material in my opinion. That’s hard to know ahead of time. That said, MLB took so many of the elite players and coaches didn’t always know who would sign and who wouldn’t. Many players were on the fence.

I remember the Clay Harris walkoff grand slam in the super regionals I think in 04.

They had some magical moments but 2006 just sucked