Orgeron’s lived, learned since his time at Ole Miss

Published 7:23 am Wednesday, October 19, 2016

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">’Twas almost 10 years ago that we gathered in this very same corner for an intellectual discourse while trying to make some sense of the “Crazy Cajun in Col’ Rebs Army.”</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Then, as now, Ole Miss was heading to Tiger Stadium, some said as part of a nutty experiment.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Anyway,</span> <span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">I threw the following theory up for discussion about the Rebels’ head coach at the time:</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Every staff in college football has an Ed Orgeron on it. You can usually spot them fairly easily on the sideline. They’re wearing sweat pants and a torn T-shirt down there among the otherwise khaki-and-polo crowd.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">They tend to spend more time around the weight room now than they did in their (usually mediocre, if overachieving) playing days.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">In the silly, macho culture of the sideline, you need at least one wacko buffer between student-athlete and staff, one</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">who will literally butt a naked forehead with a player helmet until his own (usually shaved) head bleeds.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Players eat it up.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">These guys often become fan favorites, sometimes even campus cult figures.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">They don’t normally become head coaches in 50 lifetimes.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It’s just not done.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But it was done. At Ole Miss, of all places. And I was right — it sure didn’t work.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">There was more from our discussion that day.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">They call it a plus that they landed somebody from Louisiana who does, in fact, wear shoes, though he’s still prone to ripping off his shirt in front of company.</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">So right now Ole Miss, a school best known for the civility of its white-linen tailgating, considers it a moral victory if they get through another weekend without this mongoose breaking any of school’s good china and stemware.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Yes, that was the Crazy Cajun they unloosed in Oxford, mostly to curious chuckles within the SEC.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">There are still scars around the quaint little college town.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">You’re welcome to still call him Coach B?B?, and he can’t do much about the central-casting accent. But the Ed Orgeron LSU is running through field tests right now is not the same Ed Orgeron who Ole Miss hired full-time and never could bring to halter.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">If Orgeron has one message to the powers that be judging his LSU audition, that’s it.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Call it lessons learned in Oxford.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Asked Saturday night after improving to 2-0 as LSU’s interim head coach about his memories from up there, he said, “I don’t have many memories of that place that I want to remember.”</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">He was probably never going to fit in at Ole Miss. Too rough around the edges for such a genteel crowd in such a closed-shop local society.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">By the end, there was a parody song making the rounds that mimicked his accent with the chorus:</span> <span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“Yaw-yaw-yaw-yaw-yaw-yaw … foooowball.”</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">He did get semi-lukewarm reviews for a cameo appearance in “The Blind Side,” playing himself in the recruitment of Michael Oher for Ole Miss in the movie.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“I had more success in ‘The Blind Side’ than in my coaching,” he chuckled this week. “So it might be that (that he’s most remembered for).”</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Bottom line: he’s not trying to run and hide from that 10-25 record with the Rebels. It happened.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But, he insists, it happened to a different B?B?.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“That’s a good job — and I didn’t do it well,” he admitted this week. “I didn’t like it. I was mad at myself.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“You got to look at yourself in the mirror. You can place blame on others, but nothing’s going to change. I’m the only person that can change me.”</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Mainly, he said, he tried to coach a whole team the same way he coached so many great defensive lines at Miami, at Southern Cal.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“When you’re coaching Warren Sapp, you not just going to walk in with a tie and just read a book,” he said. “I mean, it ain’t going to happen that way.”</span>

<span style="font-style: italic;" class="R~sep~ACopyBody">They don’t normally become head coaches in 50 lifetimes.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“Those techniques that I used to coach some of the best defensive lines in the country did not work as head coach.”</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Head coaches don’t normally go around head-butting quarterbacks and ripping off their shirts in team meetings. You hire stunt doubles or line coaches for that.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Yet Coach O said at the time he was intent on personally coaching up every position on the team, hands on and nostrils flaring from dawn to dusk. Never mind that he knew little of offense and tried to force Southern Cal’s attack on an offensive coordinator who knew little about it.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">“I had to get out of that (defensive line coach) mode and get more into the head coach and delegate, not be the hard butt on the staff.”</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It wasn’t a total disaster. Even then he could recruit, and he was generally credited for luring in the players that his Ole Miss replacement, Houston Nutt, coached to two straight Cotton Bowls.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But, if by the time he left Oxford, both he and the town were worn out, he had learned something.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">He already proved that. At USC he was in a similar situation to now when he interim-inherited the shambles left behind by Lane Kiffin’s firing and finished the season 6-2, delegating all the way and keeping his shirt on.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">It wasn’t enough to land the job full-time.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">Nobody of any authority has put a number on what he has do at LSU to claim this, his dream job.</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyBody">But it’s not the same Crazy Cajun that flamed out at Ole Miss.</span>

<span class="R~sep~AZaphdingbatdot7pt">l</span>

<span style="font-weight: bold;" class="R~sep~ACopyEditors~sep~endnote">Scooter Hobbs</span> <span class="R~sep~ACopyEditors~sep~endnote">covers LSU</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyEditors~sep~endnote">athletics. Email him at</span>

<span class="R~sep~ACopyEditors~sep~endnote">shobbs@americanpress.com</span>