Weird coaching search is par for LSU course, plus the 2000s’ wildest carousels

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Happy Halloween from Conway, S.C., the haunted home of the bone-chilling Chanticleers. Your blood will run teal with terror! First up today, some big news from moments ago: Matt Rhule is staying at Nebraska, signing a two-year extension rather than leaving for his alma mater, Penn State. SpoOoOoky!

Carousel Context: Just another day in the LSU carnival

In Tuesday’s newsletter, when I said I consider LSU this cycle’s hands-down best available coaching job and arguably the best anywhere, I wasn’t anticipating Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry declaring — during yesterday’s news conference allegedly on state-funded assistance amid the government shutdown — that athletic director Scott Woodward will not be in charge of hiring Brian Kelly’s replacement.

Standing obliviously behind a “Protecting the Most Vulnerable” lectern, Landry said the school’s board will handle the hiring, and wouldn’t you know it? That board is largely composed of Landry appointees. (Then again, his proclamation yesterday was news to the board.) It almost feels beside the point that LSU doesn’t have a president at the moment.

Having processed Landry’s revelation, I technically agree with the Louisiana at Lafayette alum that I’d rather not entrust somebody who was responsible for Kelly’s $53 million buyout. I’ll also reiterate LSU is this cycle’s hands-down best available coaching job and arguably the best anywhere.

Why? Because when it comes to evaluating LSU, this cartoonish stuff has been baked in for nearly a century. It was 1930 when then-governor Huey Long strutted into LSU for the first time, immediately fired the marching band director and rested his shoes on the school president’s desk, soon demanding the size of the band be quintupled to a 125-piece production.

Within a year, Long was calling himself the school’s “official thief” while pumping public money throughout campus, which included dorms being built into Tiger Stadium as a way to expand the football facility. (Long might not have come up with that idea, but it was unquestionably Long-style thinking.)

The only thing that has changed since: Roughly zero imitators have ever been as charismatic as Long. Last season, Landry’s attempt to cosplay as his predecessor by demanding there be a live tiger on LSU’s sideline was a swaggerless flop.

Otherwise, LSU football is the state of Louisiana and vice versa. I do not praise this. Or necessarily condemn it, since that’s a great band, after all. It’s just the fact of the matter.

Only a football acrobat like Les Miles could last for a long time in Death Valley, but I know of no more concrete way to evaluate these gigs than to ask, “How feasible would it be to win a national title before they’re sick of you?” Well, three straight LSU coaches had done it before Kelly, despite and/or thanks to the terrifyingly symbiotic relationship between Tiger football and all levels of society in Louisiana.

Still, lots of coaches and agents are now at least a bit wary about this job. As Stewart Mandel explains, those guys like the concept of school leadership all being on the same page, and right now, LSU doesn’t even have a page. So, Lane Kiffin, are you an acrobat or not?

Quick Snaps

🏈 It’s Penn State’s fault that this is a weekend without a lot of obvious spotlight games. Still, there is no such thing as a bad Saturday. You’ll see, like always.

Don’t overlook the competition for the G5’s Playoff spot. Navy (7-0)-North Texas (7-1) is the entree there, but treachery abounds. In addition to the American’s games on the Grid above, three of the Mountain West’s front-runners (Boise State, San Diego State and UNLV) face teams .500 or better, and the other (Hawaii) is on the road. (Full FBS schedule here.) In the Sun Belt, JMU is 7-1 after blowing out Texas State on Tuesday.
Manny Navarro’s curiously scrupulous weekend predictions include Vanderbilt and USC pulling off crucial road upsets.
Arch Manning is practicing and listed as questionable ahead of Texas hosting Vandy as a 2.5-point favorite.

📫 New Mandel mailbag here, including why the Big Ten championship will remain a big deal even if Ohio State and Indiana are 12-0 with Playoff byes locked up. (Doesn’t that sound like a huge deal, when you put it that way?)

🎓 When Bear Bryant left Texas A&M to coach his alma mater, Alabama, he explained it by saying, “Mama called.” One of the biggest questions in this cycle is whether Georgia Tech’s Brent Key, Vanderbilt’s Clark Lea, Louisville’s Jeff Brohm or Arizona State’s Kenny Dillingham will leave mama.

🌹 With coach-firing season way ahead of schedule (as this newsletter broke down on Tuesday), let’s get a head start on playing matchmaker. Joe Rexrode fixes some teams up with coaches (including ripple effects), and yeah, I’d love seeing JMU’s Bob Chesney at Penn State.

Meanwhile, the first hiring is here, with Kent State promoting interim Mark Carney after a 3-5 start, two more Ws than the entire two-year stint by predecessor Kenni Burns.

🐴 After Florida State beat Bama a couple months ago, nobody thought we’d need to ask all over again what’s wrong with the 3-4 Noles. “It has everything to do with recruiting.”

⚔️ The opposite of Tallahassee’s frantic churn? The relatively old-school rebuild that beat FSU a few weeks ago. Grace Raynor went inside No. 15 Virginia’s “frustrating” and “humbling” rise under fourth-year Tony Elliott, who entered this season at 11-23.

📰 News:

“Less than a week after the NCAA decided to allow athletes to bet on pro sports, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey asked for a reversal. He has now gotten a delay.”
The 2028 season’s national title site: Tampa. Until then: Miami, Vegas and New Orleans.
“Former South Carolina State football player Robert Geathers and his wife are owed $18 million after a jury ruled the NCAA negligent in failing to warn him of the long-term effects of concussions.”

Hot to Geaux: Busiest carousels tend to feature Tigers

Another thing about LSU having been uniquely chaotic for decades now: It has always rocked the boats everywhere else.

I was looking back through the 2000s, making a list of the wildest coaching carousels, and I noticed almost all of them happened to involve Baton Rouge in one way or another, obviously including 2025’s. Chicken or egg?

Look at this list, which skips a couple wacky cycles (2023 and 2011) that were light on LSU coach drama, but is otherwise pretty definitive:

2021: Thirty FBS schools changed coaches (20 has often been the norm), notably including top-tier poaching: USC taking Lincoln Riley from Oklahoma, Miami taking Mario Cristobal from Oregon and — most seismically at the time — LSU taking former BCS Championship participant Kelly from Notre Dame.
2017: Thirteen powers changed coaches. Florida, Oregon and Tennessee were among them, but the biggest event was Jimbo Fisher leaving Florida State for Texas A&M. How does this relate to LSU? Simple. It was a 45-21 loss by A&M at Death Valley that ended the Kevin Sumlin era and set the stage for one of the least precedented moves ever.
2016: Look closely at this news ticker about a team seeking a coach, then note which team’s players were front and center during the game happening at the same time:

Yep, 2016’s carousel was so wacky, the Tigers’ entire sideline was openly discussing their starring role while in the middle of a Thanksgiving rivalry. They would end up hiring interim Ed Orgeron two days after he won that LSU-A&M game. Tom Herman, then t LSUhe can’t-miss up-and-comer at Houston, would be hired by Texas on the same day. (The year prior, the most dramatic coach moment had also been LSU: Les Miles keeping his job by beating — you guessed it — A&M.)

2013: Big business included Penn State hiring James Franklin as its first new full-timer since 1966, Texas replacing national champ Mack Brown and Chris Petersen finally leaving Boise State. The thing everyone remembers most was USC firing Kiffin on the tarmac. How does this relate to LSU? Simple. It was eventual LSU national champ Orgeron who went 6-2 as USC’s interim, burnishing the image that would eventually help convince the Tigers to give him that shot.
2007: Pandemonium! Houston Nutt left Arkansas for Ole Miss, Bobby Petrino left the Atlanta Falcons to replace Nutt and LSU’s separated-at-birth chaos twin, Texas A&M, fired Dennis Franchione after he sold info on his own team via a high-priced newsletter (reminder that Until Saturday is free). Elsewhere, Rich Rodriguez left West Virginia for Michigan, but first, one of the biggest moments in a historically turbulent season was LSU’s Miles angrily shooting down rumors he was leaving the soon-to-be national champ for Ann Arbor. (Oh, and the coach Nutt was replacing at Ole Miss was Orgeron, who’d gone 10-25 and would need a couple of interim burnishings before he could lead the eternally main-character Tigers to glory.)
2006: In hindsight, it was college football’s biggest hire of the past century, and it was massive at the time, too. That’d be Nick Saban joining the Crimson Tide just two years after leaving his championship run in Baton Rouge for the Miami Dolphins. LSU is so important, former Tigers leave the NFL just to turn heel as the Tigers’ 17-year archvillain.
2004: The year when Miles left Oklahoma State for LSU was busy all over the place, also including Saban’s exit from LSU for the NFL, Charlie Weis’ arrival at Notre Dame from said NFL, Steve Spurrier returning to college at South Carolina and Urban Meyer leaving AP No. 4 Utah for Florida.

In short, whenever the LSU job threatens to open (or the Tigers so much as look at Texas A&M, as now happens annually), business is about to pick up exponentially.

Send your pics of your football Halloween costumes to untilsaturday@theathletic.com, and I might run one with your permission on Sunday. And now we eat candy.