Ed Orgeron took his eye off the ball and the script flipped back

Ed Orgeron entitled his 2020 memoir “Flip the Script,” describing the turnarounds that he made in his life, his career and in his LSU Tigers that led to their 2019 national championship.

“To truly flip the script, you can’t be afraid to fail,” Orgeron wrote (with Bruce Feldman). “You must start that journey by first looking in the mirror, seeing what is there, and what isn’t. Then, closing your eyes and visualizing what you hope to one day see, and then having the faith and commitment to allow it to happen. Because it can.”

I don’t know if Orgeron took his eye off the mirror, but the state of Tigers football proves that, in the season-and-a-half since that national championship, Coach O took his eye off the ball.

There is no rule in football, or in life, that prevents the script from flipping back to where you began. It’s not even all that unusual. Habits, tendencies, personalities are hard to change.

Orgeron painted the picture of his career as one of growth. He had transformed from the hard-charging tyrant who went 10-25 in three seasons (2005-07) at Ole Miss. Orgeron always could recruit and he always could coach defensive linemen, the position on the field that best combines the physical and the emotional.

But after Ole Miss, he tempered that chesty persona. He learned to delegate, and to trust, and to become more like, as he put it, “the guy who had connected with (his players) when they were recruited.”

In public, he became more teddy bear than bear, sanding the sharp corners of his belligerence. As he listened more and thought more, on the sideline he became more Bear than teddy bear.

Orgeron went 6-2 as interim coach at USC in 2013. Three seasons later, he became an interim coach again after LSU fired Les Miles in the middle of the 2016 season; including that eight-game stint in ’16, Orgeron went 40-9 in his first three-and-a-half seasons. That includes the 15-0 Tigers of 2019, one of the most dominant teams of recent history.

Orgeron had two excellent coordinators — Dave Aranda on defense, whom he inherited, and Joe Brady on offense, whom he hired. He wanted an offensive coach who knew the run-pass option game, interviewed two guys and picked Brady.  “I knew Brady didn’t have a long résumé and hadn’t been a full-time position coach,” Orgeron wrote of the assistant he hired away from the New Orleans Saints, “but in my gut, I felt like he was the right guy.”

Since the national championship, Aranda left to become coach at Baylor and Brady returned to the NFL. Orgeron replaced Aranda and Brady with Bo Pelini and Scott Linehan, two coaching veterans woefully behind the times when it came to scheme. Orgeron didn’t even interview Pelini in person. Orgeron also has been named as a defendant in a Title IX lawsuit for mishandling sexual assault claims against former Tigers running back Derrius Guice, and has gotten divorced, publicly and messily.

No one would care about any of that if LSU had kept winning. But since the national championship season, LSU is 9-8 overall, 7-7 in the SEC and 2-4 against ranked opponents (with the average margin of the four losses at 19 points).

Whether there is a cause and effect between his missteps and the Tigers’ mediocrity is impossible to say with any definition. But Orgeron lost his focus. I can’t imagine he closed his eyes and visualized what has happened to the Tigers in the past season-and-a-half. Orgeron is not the coach who went 40-9.

There is a saying on the PGA Tour that anyone can win one major championship; true greatness is measured by winning at least two. That’s a little too strict for college football. Some great coaches, like Vince Dooley, and Bob Stoops, won only one national title. But so did Larry Coker and Gene Chizik.

Orgeron may get another chance at being a college head coach, assuming he wants it. But as of now, with a record of 65-44, his winning percentage of .596 leaves him one win short of qualifying for consideration for the College Football Hall of Fame. Sounds about right.

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