LSU’s Orgeron tries to breathe free; Ensminger holds the key

Ed Orgeron

The 2017 LSU football season didn’t include Les Miles, but it contained a lot of the ingredients which marked the final few seasons of The Hat’s reign in Baton Rouge.

LSU didn’t meet the standards it expects to establish. Yet, the Tigers prevented the season from being a complete disaster and fought hard to fend off a collapse. LSU was flawed on offense and resolute on defense, inconsistent in general but timely enough to remain in the upper half of the SEC West and give Alabama a reasonably good fight. LSU toyed with its fans, as it usually does. The Tigers concluded the season with enough quality to suggest that “next year” could be “THE year,” but they were simultaneously so erratic that genuine confidence ultimately wasn’t warranted. LSU placed its fans in a familiar position: It offered them enough flashes of brilliance to suggest that with a better passing attack, this operation could soar into the top tier of college football. On the other hand, LSU had enough embarrassing offensive performances to reinforce the idea that, no, getting one’s hopes up was not the most emotionally logical response to a full season of football.

It sounded a lot like Les Miles, but in 2017, this was Ed Orgeron’s story. As the 2018 season approaches, can the Bayou Bengals shed this familiar set of clothes and put on the fresh threads of offensive efficiency? This has regularly been the most important question for the program for the past decade, with a few exceptions, such as the 2013 season in which Zach Mettenberger became a legitimately great SEC quarterback. Usually, though, LSU’s offense gets stuck. NFL-level wide receivers usually don’t dominate other SEC secondaries. Elite talent on the offensive side of the ball doesn’t translate into a juggernaut which helps the Tigers’ fire-breathing defenses. Top-tier success on both sides of the ball at the same time has generally eluded LSU this decade. That’s why the Miles era lost steam. It’s also why the hire of Ed Orgeron by athletic director Joe Alleva seemed unlikely to Alleviate (or is it Alleva-ate?) LSU’s problems. If anyone represented a strong philosophical shift from Miles, Orgergon was NOT it.

Last year showed why.

Miles got fired, if we’re being brutally honest, because he would not change his offensive philosophy. He went down with Cam Cameron instead of sacking him and going to a new-age, high-tech offensive artist. When Miles got fired, many LSU fans surely hoped that the Tigers would embrace the 21st century, or at least find a tactician who had a better track record than Cameron of getting the most out of high-end talent.

The hiring of Orgeron might not have crushed those hopes, but it made it harder for those hopes to live. It is true that Orgeron was willing to hire Matt Canada — who entered the 2017 season having turned Pittsburgh into a pyrotechnic factory the previous year — but it remained an open question if Coach O was willing to give Canada free rein.

My personal opinion — shared by many who follow the SEC and the coaching industry at large — was that for the Orgeron era to work in Baton Rouge, Coach O needed to crush it on the recruiting trail AND let his assistants become chalkboard masters who did the heavy tactical lifting. Very clearly, 2017 shattered the notion that Orgeron would give his offensive coordinator carte blanche to run the offense. Orgeron and Canada were oil and water, rarely if ever on the same page. Either Orgeron should have allowed Canada to work his magic, or he never should have hired Canada at all…

… but this is LSU, where dysfunction has been a constant part of the landscape over the past four years. A program which made two national title games in a five-year span (2007-2011) and three national title games in nine years (2003-11) didn’t have that big rebound season a few years later. LSU remained second to Alabama as this decade developed, while Auburn — with a national title game appearance in the 2013 season and a victory over Bama last year — has become the foremost challenger to the Crimson Tide in the SEC West. LSU shouldn’t be in this position, but it is, and the craziness at the head coaching and offensive coordinator spots (with impotent leadership in the athletic director’s chair) is the central source of the problem.

As the 2018 season begins, Orgeron is the man everyone is focused on. He might not be in the hottest of national hot seats due to buyout figures, but at the very least, he is setting himself up for a pink slip at the end of the 2019 season if this year goes the way many think it will. Why is this year creating so little cause for optimism in Red Stick? The offensive coordinator.

Steve Ensminger elicits a groan and an upset stomach from Auburn fans. Ensminger was part of the sinking ship on which Tommy Tuberville drowned in 2008. Ensminger was on Miles’ LSU staff when The Hat lost his hold on power. Ensminger was part of Ray Goff’s staff at Georgia in the early 1990s. We all know how well that tenure went. Ensminger was an offensive coordinator on Tommy West’s last two failed teams at Clemson in the late 1990s, before Tommy Bowden and coordinator Rich Rodriguez took over in 1999 and improved the program.

In decades of coaching at schools throughout the south and in Texas, Ensminger can point to one particularly great season as an offensive coordinator: 1994 at Texas A&M… a year in which the Aggies were placed on probation and were ineligible for a bowl game. A&M went 10-0-1 that season, and Ensminger put together the pieces of that offense extremely well… but the pressure was off the Aggies throughout that campaign. Not playing for a Cotton Bowl bid or the other prizes pursued by postseason-eligible teams changed the dynamic for A&M in 1994. That’s the one time a Steve Ensminger-coordinated offense maximized its gifts.

Otherwise, Ensminger has struggled to find a groove, and much of his career has been defined by the reality of being on ships that sank. Georgia, Clemson, Auburn, and Miles-era LSU represent four separate examples.

THIS is the man Ed Orgeron wants by his side in a crucial year? THIS is the man Coach O is trusting against Alabama, and at Auburn, and against Jimbo Fisher and Texas A&M? This is the man charged with potentially coaching Joe Barrow, one of the high-profile transfers from the past offseason (from Ohio State)?

Orgeron — colorful, clumsy and a creator of chaos — is the man at the center of the storm for LSU. To a certain extent, any success LSU has will be traced back to him, because he has made decisions other coaches wouldn’t have made. Yet, Ensminger is the man who has to validate Coach O’s moves. He has to surprise most SEC observers who have followed his conspicuously ordinary career for decades. He has to cut against the grain of his own unremarkable track record. He has to deliver the kinds of results LSU hasn’t generally produced on offense this decade.

If he succeeds, Ensminger will make Coach O look like a genius… but history tells us that Ed Orgeron doesn’t generally look like a genius.

Orgeron is the national focus as far as LSU football is concerned, but Ensminger is the man who will most centrally determine where this program is headed.



About 14Powers.com 4609 Articles
14Powers.com: Serving SEC Football, Basketball and Baseball fans since 2016.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.