Louisiana Voice

In retrospect, LSU got a bargain when it fired basketball coach Johnny Jones.

He only got $750,000 in severance pay.

Les Miles got twice that – $1.5 million – to go away and he got that much even after his departure under the cloud of the Title IX scandal that enveloped the LSU athletic program, even to the point of his being accused of sexual impropriety.

And that awful hire of Bo Pelini who was supposed to resurrect the Tigers’ four-man defensive front. But Pelini came with baggage and he and head coach Ed Orgeron were the personification of oil and water – they just didn’t mix – and LSU’s defense averaged surrendering 429 yards per game, fourth-worst among FBS teams.

The answer, of course, was to write another check. In this case Pelini got $4 million to make an early departure. Between Pelini, offensive coordinator Matt Canada and passing game coordinator Scott Linehan, who also were asked to exit, LSU cut checks totaling $7 million.

Now comes word that LSU, less than two years removed from a national championship from one of the best teams ever assembled and after giving Orgeron a nice raise and a contract extension, will now pay “Coach O” $16.949 million (oh, hell, just say $17 mil and be done with it) to vacate the premises at the end of the 2021 season.

The signs were there all the time that Orgeron was a problem just waiting to erupt. There was that restraining order from a woman in Miami during his time with the Hurricanes, his altercation at a bar in Baton Rouge as a visiting coach, his reported hell-raising drinking problems early in his career, and the unconfirmed story of his habit of cutting across a neighbor’s lawn in his pickup truck when he was head coach at the University of Mississippi. One entrenched at LSU, there was his divorce and later, that photo of him and a girlfriend in bed, all capped off by his mishandling of reports of sexual assaults by his players.

But then, there was that miracle of 2019 that managed to gloss over all those personal and professional warts only to be followed by failures that resulted in the blunt reminder of those shortcomings. Does anyone else see a parallel with a guy named Trump here?

So, now, in addition to forking out $17 million to bid adieu to the gravely-voiced Orgeron, the school will have to come up with another huge multi-year cash outlay to entice some other coach to Baton Rouge and Canes Chicken is going to have to shell out a few thousand to change all its billboards that currently tout “Coach O” in favor of the newcomer.

You’d never know things were tight economically around Baton Rouge what with the payout to Orgeron, that eight-year, $23.6 million contract for Kim Mulkey and the paltry $6.5 million, five-year contract for incoming baseball coach Jay Johnson.

Well, you wouldn’t know things were tight unless you visited other parts of the LSU campus, beginning with the school’s library where employees with offices in the basement know to wear rain boots during heavy rainfall because the water drips through the ceiling lights and pools around their feet and shelves on the lower floor are covered in plastic sheeting to protect microfilm and ancient government texts from the drips and floor tiles have been replaced with sheets of plywood.

It was estimated in 2016 that LSU had a $510 million BACKLOG  of renovation and improvement projects on its Baton Rouge campus. By 2019, that figure had swollen to $720 MILLION.

That same year, LSU opened an all-new, ultra-modern $28 million football OPERATIONS BUILDING  – complete with sleeping pods for those poor jocks. And yes, I’m aware it was financed with private funding, which says a lot about just what all those LSU supporters support.

Across all of Louisiana’s four- and two-year public schools, the total backlog on deferred maintenance ranges from $1.5 billion to $2 billion. The projects waiting for funding include roof replacements, air conditioning and heating unit repairs, upgrades to make buildings accessible to the disabled and other improvements associated with the wear and tear of decades-old facilities.

Public higher education institutions saw their state aid slashed by 55 percent during former Gov. Bobby Jindal’s tenure. And although tuition and fee increases can be used to plug operating budgets at many schools like LSU, campuses are struggling to deal with their growing lists of renovation and infrastructure needs as historic buildings continue to age without funds to maintain them.

Over the past five years, the Board of Regents reports that only $4.5 million has been allocated for deferred maintenance work at higher education facilities.

But there’s no shortage of money to hire coaches and pay them top-tier money and then shell out mega-bucks to make them go away when they don’t meet expectations.

And for good measure, there’s also sufficient funds available to build the Taj Mahal of facilities to ensure that the athletes will continue to be pampered, no matter who occupies the head coach’s office.