LSU is desperate to turn over a new leaf after firing Brian Kelly on Sunday, and while it was important to nail the hire — finding a qualified candidate should have been easy. Taking over the Tigers is a dream job almost every coach in the country would want, well, that is until a politician got involved and tanked it all.
Louisiana governor Jeff Landry held a press conference on Wednesday to discuss the 800,000+ people in his state who will lose their SNAP benefits as a result of the government shutdown. Then he went off script about the LSU head coaching search, injected himself in the process, and fundamentally kneecapped the school from being able to make a good hire. It’s difficult to overstate how much damage one man did with an open microphone.
What exactly did Jeff Landry say?
Landry tried to grab easy points by feeding off public frustration with LSU athletic director Scott Woodward by boldly proclaiming that Woodward wouldn’t be picking the next head coach for the school, and that he’d “let Donald Trump” pick the next head coach, before letting Woodward do it. Landry went on to continue slamming the AD, mocking Woodward for hiring Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M, then hiring Kelly at LSU — both of which failed and cost the respective schools in their buyouts.
“We are not going down a failed path. And I wanted to tell you something. This is a pattern. The guy that wrote [Kelly’s] contract cost Texas A&M $70-something million. We have a $53 million liability. I believe that we are going to find a great coach. The board of supervisors are going to come up with a committee and they’re going to find us a coach.”
The governor went on to slam coaching circles in general, noting that many of the top college head coaches have the same agency representation, in this case one of the largest in all of sports: Creative Artist Agency (CAA).
In one fell swoop Landry managed to undermine the school’s hiring process by saying Woodward wasn’t involved, foist the job on the LSU board of directors, and managed to call out the largest agency in sports — suggesting something untoward was happening by agents maximizing value for their clients.
Forget red flags, these are signal flares for anyone who would have entertained the job. The press conference came as a total surprise to the LSU board, who hadn’t spoken to Landry about the nature of the search, but were now being named publicly as responsible for finding the successor.
Scott Ballard, the chair of the LSU board of supervisors, had no idea about the plan the governor laid the groundwork for with the board picking the next coach, saying “I didn’t know that,” when asked about Landry’s statements.
Landry wasn’t done either. He continued to try to curry favor with angry LSU fans by saying he was “tired of rewarding failure,” before indicating the state would put some arbitrary metrics on the next head coach to keep them accountable and protect the tax dollars of Louisiana.
Why was this press conference so bad?
Landry’s conference has been called a “momentum killer,” with one LSU fan begging Landry to “stay in his lane.” This is because they understand the forces at play. While college football is an element of the state education system when it comes to public universities, there’s also always a separation of church and state when it comes to politicians getting involved in the athletic department.
It’s certainly fair to question whether or not this is a good thing, and unquestionably prudent to voice concern over swelling program expenditure when it comes to coaching salaries costing over $10M a year — but LSU isn’t going to put that genie back in the bottle on its own. The more money college football brings in, the more it will spend. It’s that simple. There’s a greater demand for top-tier football coaches than there are people available for jobs, meaning supply and demand has pushed salaries into the stratosphere.
So when Landry steps to the dais and says not only does he want to protect tax dollars (which reads like cheapness), but also that the state will put metrics on the incoming coach, suddenly an already difficult LSU job becomes undesirable. No good coach wants to have to answer to politicians outside of an athletic department, or be dictated to by someone without a football background. It’s that simple.
Would someone like Lane Kiffin rather coach at Florida where he’ll have the freedom to shape the program and build it like any other team, or LSU where he’ll be under the gun immediately and pressured to answer questions from the governor if the Tigers take time to build? This is a rhetorical question, because the answer is unquestionably the former — even if LSU is a higher profile, more prestigious job than Florida at the moment.
All of this is before we even get to discussing the nature of going after CAA for seemingly no reason. More specifically going after Jimmy Sexton of CAA, who represents Jimbo Fisher, Brian Kelly — and, you guessed it, Lane Kiffin. Why in the world would an agent lobby for their client to pick LSU now over almost any other P5 job, assuming the expectation Landry will be involved still looms?
What happens next?
It’s unclear how big the fallout from this press conference will be. Some of that is in Landry’s hands, but more pressure is put on the LSU board.
Landry could own the fact he was talking out of his ass to try and deflect from the food assistance crisis, but that seems wholly unlikely. Politicians aren’t good at admitting their screwups at the best of times, let alone when it comes to such a confident, unforced error as mouthing off about a coaching search he shouldn’t have a role in.
It’s also extremely unlikely that this will go without notice at all. The damage has been done behind closed doors, and now it’s someone else’s mess to clean up.
That will all be the job of LSU’s board of supervisors. They now need to contend with:
- An athletic director made to feel like a lame duck
- A governor who wants to feel like he’s part of the process
- Reassuring a prospective coach that LSU is operating under a normal process, without the intervention of state government
This is an absolute mess. In one fell swoop LSU went from being the No. 1 job in the country, to now being a massive question mark. If we see high profile coaches snub LSU in favor of lower profile jobs then we’ll know that Gov. Landry did an incalculable amount of damage to this process by opening his mouth.
