Blame Woodward for Texas A&M’S fall?
COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M sent a strong message to football coach Jimbo Fisher this week: The Aggies fired their volleyball coach.
We kid, but A&M athletic director Ross Bjork is not taking a small first step in cleaning up one of the leftover messes of his predecessor, Scott Woodward. That's current LSU athletic director Scott Woodward, who left A&M in April 2019 for his alma mater in his hometown of Baton Rouge, La.
In the wild world of college sports, one theory among a handful of A&M fans — let's hope it's only a handful — is Woodward purposely sabotaged their favorite athletic department with bad hires before heading home to an SEC West rival.
The bad Aggies and division champ Tigers happen to meet in football Saturday night at Kyle Field, and Woodward will be the guy with the big grin considering his early success with the hire of coach Brian Kelly from Notre Dame a year ago.
No. 6 LSU, a near 10point favorite on the road at A&M, must beat the Aggies and then Georgia in the SEC title game Dec. 3 in Atlanta to have a shot at the four-team College Football Playoff.
In a game of musical chairs among athletic directors a little more than three years ago, A&M hired Bjork from Mississippi to replace Woodward.
Bjork's first big hire, baseball coach Jim Schlossnagle from TCU, led the Aggies to their highest finish in program histor: No. 3 in the final 2022 Associated Press poll and to the final four of the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.
Incredibly, considering the deep pockets and deeper passion of A&M and its huge fan base, that No. 3 ranking was the Aggies' highest in any of the big three men's sports — football, basketball and baseball — since the football team won the national title in 1939.
Bringing us back to Woodward and his mound of failures (to date) at A&M. Five years ago he hired Kansas assistant Laura “Bird” Kuhn to head up volleyball after the resignation of Laurie Corbelli, who'd turned the program into an NCAA Tournament regular over 25 years.
Kuhn made the NCAA postseason once in five seasons before her firing this week.
In a much-higher-profile hire a few weeks before Kuhn, Woodward brought his old friend Fisher onboard to lead the football team.
The two had worked together at LSU in the early 2000s, with Woodward a rising star in administration and Fisher serving as then-lsu coach Nick Saban's offensive coordinator. Fisher later led Florida State to a national title as a head coach in 2013, and Woodward's most notable A&M hire was expected to do what Kelly already has done in his first year: win a division title.
Fisher has not, and the Aggies (4-7, 1-6 SEC) lost six straight games this season for the first time in 50 years. After the 2020 season, when A&M finished 9-1 and No. 4 in the final AP poll, the Aggies under Bjork reupped Fisher's contract to its original 10 years and bumped his annual pay from $7.5 million to $9 million.
Why? Because Woodward was supposedly trying to hire Fisher to replace the flailing Ed Orgeron, who'd led LSU to a national title in 2019 but was a handful off the field — along with the Tigers failing on the field in 2020 with a 5-5 record.
A&M further tying itself to a now-failing football coach, thanks especially to Woodward's overtures from LSU in 2021, strengthens the farcical “sabotage” theory among angry A&M fans — including that a wizardly Woodward was able to still pull strings in College Station from his perch in Baton Rouge.
Bringing us to basketball. Woodward in March 2019 fired Billy Kennedy, who had made the Sweet 16 in 2016 and 2018 but otherwise had failed over eight seasons, and hired native Texan Buzz Williams from Virginia Tech — just before exiting for LSU.
Williams has failed (there's that word again) to make the NCAA Tournament in his first three seasons at A&M, and the Aggies last week lost consecutive games to Murray State and Colorado by a combined 37 points at an invitational before rebounding with a win over Loyola-chicago.
All in all it's been an awful fall for A&M sports, starting with the football team's first losing record since 2008 while failing to qualify for a bowl for the first time since. The volleyball team finished 5-13 in SEC play, and the soccer team also had a losing record against league competition (3-4-3) and dropped a first-round NCAA Tournament match at old rival Texas to close out a rare subpar season under longtime coach G. Guerrieri.
Meantime, because of Fisher's long-term, fully guaranteed contract, he will not be fired after this lost season — the Aggies are stuck with him for a spell of for better or worse — and he's expected to overhaul his offensive staff, including finally hiring a true coordinator to handle play-calling, which Fisher has failed at big time this season.
It adds up to this for aggravated A&M fans, and with Woodward laughing all the way to Atlanta after a pit stop in his brief stomping ground of College Station: When does baseball season start again?