Recruiting worries subside in New Orleans

Published 5:53 am Friday, February 10, 2017

Take a deep breath, Tigers.

It’s OK to exhale now.

It doesn’t appear that New Orleans is going to be boycotting LSU football anytime soon.

False alarm. Crisis averted. Please go back to whatever it was you were doing before the world almost fell apart.

How serious a threat it ever was is open to interpretation and speculation, mostly (but you already guessed this) fueled by the internet.

New Orleans-area high school players are now free to move about the country, including Baton Rouge.

This whole brouhaha started on a website, and was quickly flamed by “forwards” and “likes” and other tricks of the www trade until everything but the oaks on the LSU campus were reportedly in flames.

It got a lot of hits, so it was a success from the website’s point of view, even as anonymous sources started backtracking like crawfish on a hot driveway.

It started with reports that several inner-city high school coaches in recruiting-rich New Orleans had scheduled a meeting for Thursday night, when this mass boycott might be hatched as a protest against LSU head coach Ed Orgeron, perhaps sealed with a blood oath.

They were reportedly upset that Orgeron fired running backs coach Jabbar Juluke — or “reassigned” him, if you prefer; at any rate, after Orgeron wished him well in his future endeavors. Juluke ended up taking a job at Texas Tech.

Juluke was one from their close-knit fraternity, a former state championship head coach at Edna Karr High School, and the insinuation was that he hadn’t gotten a fair shake from Coach O.

But a boycott? Eliminating one the country’s top programs from a young man’s wish list?

First of all, just to clarify, LSU probably wasn’t recruiting any of the New Orleans high school coaches anyway.

When rounding up talent, the Tigers usually find it better to go after the high school players, who are generally much stronger, faster and certainly far younger and more agile than their coaches.

How any coaches might have made the boycott binding to their 17-year-old players is anybody’s wild guess.

Presumably they could still pursue higher education (and football) at the school of their choice, but it’s not too far-fetched to think the coaches might have some influence, at least in isolated cases.

At any rate, with the internet raging, several of those high school coaches quickly announced that they were boycotting the alleged LSU boycott meeting, while others were quick to point out that a boycott wasn’t really on the agenda anyway.

It was more, some said, to discuss ways to better educate themselves about the recruiting process.

The truth is probably somewhere in between.

In the meantime, Orgeron added two new coaches, Tommie Robinson and Mickey Joseph, the latter, predictably, a New Orleans native and veteran of its recruiting wars.

Basically, he has the same roots as Juluke, but with more college experience.

“He’s going to do a great job of recruiting the city of New Orleans and the river parishes,” Orgeron said.

So what’s all the fuss about? Has the coup been avoided?

“I have strong relationships with those coaches in New Orleans,” Joseph said Thursday when Orgeron introduced him at a news conference. “I have been recruiting New Orleans since 1999. I either grew up with those guys (coaches) or mentored the guys along the way.

“I have spoken to those guys and there was never a meeting discussed about a boycott,” he said.

“Those guys are in it for the kids. The meeting was going to take place because what they are trying to do is educate each other about the recruiting game and also how to get some financial help to get the kids to these camps.”

Many, Joseph said, can’t afford the summer camps, where much of the real recruiting takes place.

“Once negative things got written it got carried on,” he explained. “It was never going to be (a boycott) after talking to those guys at the respective high schools.”

Orgeron called Joseph a legend, and he was all of that as a high school player at Archbishop Shaw.

But when he starts trumpeting the benefits of New Orleans kids staying close to home, he’ll have to explain why he took his own talents to Nebraska, where he had a successful run as the Cornhuskers starting quarterback (1988-91).

“I can tell kids sometimes leaving home is not always good,” he said, even though on the surface it appeared to work out for him.

His mom, he said, was all in for him going to LSU then. She was particularly fond of Pete Jenkins, who recruited him.

“She called this morning asking if Pete was still on staff,” Joseph said. That was two LSU hitches ago for Jenkins, but the answer was still yes.

“If my dad had listened to Pete Jenkins I would have been a Tiger,” he recalled.

Still he remembers the home-state Nebraska players always had family greeting them outside the locker room.

“When you leave the state and go away from home there is no one there when you leave that locker room after a game,” he said. “I did that for five years and that was one of the reasons I wanted to come back to the state of Louisiana and coach football.”