BATON ROUGE, La. — As Ed Orgeron attempted to figure out how to navigate some of the trickiest waters he’s seen in years, he called his mentor. He called Pete Carroll.
Times are tense at LSU. Orgeron compared it to the days after the 2017 home loss to Troy. He compared it to the “black clouds all over” that first season. He knows he has a situation to handle, and he needs to do it correctly.
He has
star players opting out. He has others transferring. He had a players’ protest on societal issues during scheduled practice time that he wasn’t told about. He had COVID-19 temporarily taking most of LSU’s offensive line out of practice. He scolded a reporter Tuesday for reporting stories with anonymous sources.
A section of the locker room was upset when he went on Fox News and said
“I love President Trump.” There’s an ever-growing national discussion on racial justice amid police violence, and there’s a perfect storm building, a challenge for Orgeron as a title-winning head coach. How will he handle it? It’s a test of the traits for which he’s most praised.
This outlet —
maybe more than
any other — has praised Orgeron for his ability to adapt, for his ability to listen, for his ability to see what he’s doing wrong and make a change for the better. Those traits are how he went from a well-documented failure at Ole Miss to the national coach of the year in 2019 on the way to an undefeated national championship.
And now Orgeron truly needs to listen. He needs to adapt. He admitted that repeatedly to reporters in a Zoom news conference Tuesday. He said it’s been a weekend of thinking and talking and learning.
He called Carroll, a Super Bowl- and national championship-winning coach who took Orgeron under his wing at USC in the 2000s. Carroll also happens to be one of the
most open-minded and vocal coaches in football on societal issues. Orgeron asked his mentor about how he’s handling everything going on in the country with social injustice and racism.
Orgeron’s catchphrase is “block out the noise,” preaching a focused program that ignores outside influences. After his call with Carroll, he said:
“When I say ‘block out the noise,’ when we come into work we’re focusing on the task at hand. But it’s not being oblivious to what’s going on out there. Because obviously it’s affecting our players. If it’s affecting our players, I need to be educated on what’s going on, why it’s going on, listen to them, open up some dialogue and find some solutions.”
That’s step one.
Friday was a tricky day for Orgeron. He went into the room for LSU’s 1:30 p.m. team meeting only to find that six players showed up, people familiar with the matter said. The players didn’t tell him about a protest — organized by safety JaCoby Stevens and defensive end Andre Anthony — taking place outside of Tiger Stadium. They skipped the meeting to demand change in the wake of police violence against George Floyd, Jacob Blake and countless others. Once Orgeron knew about it, he asked assistant coaches such as Corey Raymond to go talk to the players and figure out what was going on as they marched to the LSU president’s office.
“I got a call, ‘Coach, the team would like to meet you. They are at the president’s office,’” Orgeron recalled. “That was the next thing I heard.”
He then made his way to president Tom Galligan’s office, and Orgeron and his players spoke for more than an hour about what was going on inside the locker room and in the country. When it was over, Orgeron told reporters he needed to listen, and Stevens and Anthony said they were proud of Orgeron for starting to dive into the discussion.
Still, whether fair or not, criticism of Orgeron grew when other premier coaches such as Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley and
Alabama’s Nick Saban led protests with their teams and marched with them.
Politics and football. Many want athletes and coaches to avoid mixing the two, but that’s off the table in 2020. Most people close to Orgeron say he’s generally an apolitical person who doesn’t speak much about right or left. Former LSU linebacker and first-round pick K’Lavon Chaisson, likely the player Orgeron has the closest relationship with and who he described as “like a son to me,” criticized Orgeron after his Trump comments by tweeting: “Coach O is a great man and I know he didn’t mean any harm by this but he is the definition of only know and care about football. He is blind to everything else.”
But Orgeron has also
become quite close with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat. He’s appeared at Edwards’ re-election fundraisers. He’s been Edwards’ point man for
promoting COVID-19 awareness. Orgeron doesn’t speak on political issues, per se, but he works closely with somebody like Edwards, who wields great power in the state.
None of this needs to be about politics, though. It just needs to be about being empathetic to a roster of primarily Black student-athletes who are in pain right now. Orgeron said of his meeting with the players Friday:
“It was different, obviously, but in the end, I had a meeting with the players. They voiced their opinion. I voiced mine. That was all handled in-house. I thought it was a good growing experience for both of us, for me as a head coach and for our football team. For me to listen to the things going on with them and why they did it and being part of the solution.”
LSU had Ryan Clark, the former LSU safety and current ESPN analyst,
speak to the leadership council on Tuesday. Orgeron is entering this week with a different understanding of how he should approach these problems. To date, quite frankly, Orgeron has simply “blocked out the noise.”