"He was an unbelievably pleasant surprise to me, in what he did to our culture. I think it was the way the players reacted to him, the way everyone in the building reacted to him. He totally energized the whole building. You can’t play football without emotion and passion. He brought that back to the building.
"I think everyone had realized his ability to recruit, and we saw he’d learned so much from his previous jobs on how to be a head coach.
"I talked to some people before Ed ever came here. I got some opinions of people before he was ever on our staff. I had some impressions from them, but most of the impressions were very favorable in most categories. The exception was that he was a little headstrong and a little bit too hard on kids sometimes, but these are lessons he’s learned."
Orgeron knew none of this at the time.
PART 3: BLACK FRIDAY, JOB INTERVIEW DAY
"Me, Derek, and Austin [Thomas, LSU’s player personnel director], we thought we were gonna get offered the job that day. We had our plan, we go in, we sat at that table, and we’re ready to go. We walk in there, and ... within a minute, we knew we were in second place. We just knew it.
"I could just tell, from the room. I asked Derek and Austin to leave, so Joe and I could have a talk. He says, ‘Look, I have not made a hire, and we have not offered anyone the job.’ I told Joe, ‘You’ve always told me the truth.’ And he says, ‘But I am going to see Tom Herman tonight or tomorrow morning. I have not offered him the job yet, and you are a strong candidate. He may be first. You’re probably second.’
"My life’s flashing before my eyes. [Orgeron’s snapping his fingers.] And you know, it slipped out on me before, on that Monday morning at USC [where he was also an interim]. And after that meeting, I thought, no way, no way ... It happened again! It’s happened again! What am I going to do?
"All my eggs were in this basket, man. All I ever thought about was being the head coach of LSU. I don’t think there wasn’t a day we didn’t believe we were going to get it.
"We walked out the door. We were white as ghosts, man. So you know what we did? Started competing! [He snaps his fingers again, loudly.) Kept on competing. Got calls going into Joe. Pete [Carrol] called him, Lane [Kiffin] called him, bang bang bang."
So you start recruiting your own AD?
"Oh ho, yeah baby. We got it rolling. Joe had been a friend of ours. But he had a job to do. We understood. But for eight weeks, I hadn’t been home. I told my wife when I got the job, ‘You want to see me, come here.’ But I start getting my stuff together. I’m done. I think. It’s over. I’m done.
"Then on the way home, Joe calls me. Starts asking some questions. ‘What about this? What about that?’ Asking about things [from Orgeron’s presentation]. OK … alright … so, maybe? Maybe, right?
"So I go home. We had Thanksgiving dinner. I didn’t want to have Thanksgiving. It was the day after, you know? My family’s not there; my boys have their girlfriends and all that. I’m sitting at the table … pfff …
"Long story short. I say my prayers. Go to bed. Early, I go to bed. I remember Houston gets beat by Memphis.
"I say my prayer: ‘God, if it’s your will, I’m gonna get it.’ My wife says to me, ‘Why do you look so sad?’ I said, ‘You kidding me? Are you watching the TV? They giving the job to Tom Herman!’
"She said, ‘Oh no, they’re not.’ She says, ‘You’re gonna wake up tomorrow and be the head coach of LSU.’ Can you believe it? I said ‘Yeah right!’ and rolled over. I go to sleep.
"My phone goes off. Text message at 1:30. It’s Lane Kiffin: ‘Herman leaving to coach Texas.’
"I looked at it, and you know what? I went right back to sleep, man."
Kiffin was definitely coming to LSU from Alabama to be the Tigers’ offensive coordinator, per multiple, multiple sources. And per Orgeron, who’d included Kiffin’s name as OC on a projected coaching staff during his interview.
"I know probably — and I can’t blame them — I know that Alabama probably didn’t want him to come here," Orgeron says. "I’m assuming they did everything they could to get him a head job. But he was honest with us. He said, ‘Coach, I’m coming to LSU unless I get a head job, and I want a head job.’
"We thought he had the Houston job. He woulda been dynamite there. Dynamite. Then we hear about Florida Atlantic, and we didn’t think he’d take that. But he calls and says, ‘Hey man, I’m coming. I’ve got one more meeting, and I’m just going to listen to them.’ Ended up, he took the job."
The staff retrenched, preparing for a battle to land Matt Canada, the offseason’s hottest coordinator candidate. With defensive coordinator Dave Aranda locked into a $1.8 million annual deal, Orgeron, with Alleva’s blessing, wanted an equally notable — and compensated — OC.
"The day we got him here, we knew Notre Dame, UCLA, Tennessee was all after him. That’s not all of them. These schools were just dying to get him. So we had to move. And the guy was wanted, so we had to make the right offer," Orgeron says.
Canada signed a $1.5 million annual deal, putting LSU at $3.3 million in coordinator pay. The moves fortify the Tigers with arguably the best coordinator duo in the game, a statement to those critical of O’s acumen as a CEO. If either gets a head coaching or NFL gig, bring on the next bidding war.
"I don’t look at any of those things as costs," Alleva says. "Those are investments. You make investments to improve. I look at the dollars that we spend on those guys as investments to be better."
It’s a popular theory that the buzz around poaching Kiffin — both as a pure playcaller and as a spoil of war from hated Tuscaloosa — provided Orgeron an extra boost during the crucial phase of his audition process. Not so, according to the man who removed his interim tag.
"The thing [Orgeron] had to convince me of was how he’d be different than he was at Ole Miss, to be quite frank," Alleva says.
"And he just laid out that. He said he’d learned a lot. He delegates to people who are experts at what they do, and he realizes he’s not an expert at everything, just like any of us. We have to hire people that are good at things we’re not good at."
Orgeron suspects it’s a major factor that kept him from getting the USC job.
"I just look back at those times at Ole Miss ... I was going as hard as I could. And there’s no manual to being a head coach. And all those times, after, I’d think what it would be like if I could do things different," Orgeron says.
But there’s a point at which he’s begun to stop apologizing. Yes, he was too inexperienced, but what defensive line coach would turn down an SEC head coaching job?
"That was a bad marriage to begin with, from day one. I knew about the second week we were there, they didn’t want us. I went in there with an open mind. I was excited to get that job! I wanted to like it. And I wanted those people to like me. It just didn’t happen. I never thought I’d face the things I faced in Oxford. The things me and my family went through.
"But we went through it for a reason. We’re home now."