PURPLE & GOLD STANDARD
Orgeron leads this all-time LSU team to one of most impressive titles in history
NEW ORLEANS — The first volley of confetti had already been liberated from the Superdome ceiling, and a good two-thirds of the 76,885 inside were beginning a celebration that wouldn’t end until well past the other side of midnight, somewhere in the inviting quarters of the French Quarter.
Ed Orgeron’s quarterback, a kid from Ohio named Joe Burrow, took the final knee of the football season, and that’s when the sound inside this massive old dome hit Defcon 2. The clock melted to zero, the scoreboard all but screamed alongside the faithful of the winning pride of tigers: LSU 42, Clemson 25. That was forever. That was for keeps.
“Oh boy,” Ed Orgeron said to himself, as he began the fateful jog to midfield, where he would be greeted with a bear-hug by Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, a man who has twice known exactly what was percolating inside Ed Orgeron’s heart. Two of his sons, Cody and Parker, grabbed Orgeron’s arms. His wife, Kelly, put her arm around him. They all jogged together.
“COACH O!” a large chunk of faithful began chanting from the very top of the building, cascading down. In New Orleans and Baton Rouge and West Monrow and Lafourche Parish, all the Louisiana places where LSU football means so very much to so very many, they spell that “Coach Eaux,” of course. There may be no place in the country where a coach and a fan base share so much.
“One team, one heartbeat, baby!” he would soon yell into a microphone, minutes after officially hoisting the national championship trophy over his head, toward all the masses of purple-clad people all over the Superdome who had spent the previous four hours screaming themselves hoarse, and much of the past 15 minutes yelling, crying, laughing — the whole gamut. The fans had done that.
And the biggest fan — Coach Eaux — had done that, too.
“I’m so proud and so happy for the people of Louisiana,” said Ed Orgeron, son of Ba Ba and Co Co Orgeron, son of Lafourche Parish. “They deserve this so much. They deserve this season. They deserve this team.”
And this team — man, oh, man, this team. LSU won 15 games in 15 tries. They beat seven Top-10 teams. They became only the second team in the history of college football to score 700 points and by the time they were done they’d landed on 726 — three more than Florida State in 2013, the most of any team ever.
They’d ransacked this football season, and so it is immediately fair to wonder where this team ranks among the greatest ever. Recency bias is a powerful thing, and it may turn out that LSU’s reign is a brief one. But for one season, for 4 ½ months, for 15 games, it is hard to envision how a team could be better than this one.
“All I know,” Joe Burrow said, “is that this was a team that never flinched, that never panicked, not even tonight when we were down 17-7. We had one purpose and that was to win. And we won. Every game.”
They are the perfect pair, the quarterback and the coach. Burrow tried three times to make first string at Ohio State, finally decided to leave, picked LSU over a bowl of boiled crawfish. Orgeron? He went 10-25 at Ole Miss, went 0-8 in the SEC his last year there. He got a second chance at USC, went 6-2 as an interim, but wasn’t hired. The USC sharpies thought his heavy Cajun accent wouldn’t play with boosters and movie stars.
So Coach Eaux went home. He spent a year away from coaching, came back to work for Les Miles, took over when Miles was fired four games into the 2016 season. Outside Louisiana they laughed at Orgeron, they mocked LSU, they waited for this horrible idea to blow up in their faces.
They are waiting still. Orgeron had spent a few weeks at LSU as a freshman, got homesick, played at Northwestern State in Natchitoches instead, began the peripatetic voyage of a coaching lifer and started to dream of one job — this job. He learned from his mistakes. He hired good people around him. He sold Burrow on joining him on the journey.
And look where he is now. Look where he was, just before 11 o’clock local time Monday night, his eyes filling with tears, his voice ransacked (though how can you really tell?), his football team gathered under endless, teeming confetti, his fans chanting his name.
Are these Tigers the best team of all time? Maybe all you had to do was take a straw poll of the folks in the mezzanine and the upper deck, the ones who refused to leave, the ones who wanted to thank Coach Eaux for this night, this team, this season. That one would’ve come back unanimous.