LSU football: Ed Orgeron comfortable after spicing up his staff with Louisiana guys

Ed Orgeron didn’t play at LSU, but he might as well have.

He’s a native of LaRose, La., who grew up as a Tigers fan and enrolled at LSU before seeing the handwriting on the wall and transferring to Northwestern State so he would have a much better opportunity to play.

But he was always a Tiger at heart, watching Charlie McClendon become the winningest coach in LSU history while unleashing the Tigers in Death Valley on Saturday night.

Nothing is more Louisiana than that.

On Saturday night against Southeastern Louisiana, Orgeron will lead his No. 11-ranked Tigers onto the Tiger Stadium field for the first time this season after a 33-17 win over preseason No. 8 Miami last Sunday.

“Tiger Stadium, that’s what we wait all year for,” Orgeron said this week.

Orgeron has surrounded himself with coaches that have a similar affinity for LSU, Tiger Stadium and Louisiana. Six of Orgeron’s 10 assistants that have on-field football responsibilities have Louisiana ties.

Offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger, defensive backs coach Corey Raymond and defensive line coach Mickey Johnson played at LSU. Wide receivers coach Mickey Joseph is a native of New Orleans, special teams coordinator Greg McMahon was an assistant with the New Orleans Saints and senior offensive assistant passing game coordinator Jerry Sullivan established himself as an assistant in a previous stint at LSU before leaving and returning under Orgeron.

“I trust these guys,” Orgeron said.

Of course he also trusts associate head coach/defensive coordinator Dave Aranda, safeties coach Bill Busch and offensive line coach James Cregg, but there’s something special about having Louisiana football in your blood, or at least having been exposed to it previously.

It took Orgeron 33 years to land his dream job. His nomadic career prior to being hired as defensive line coach by former Tigers coach Les Miles included 11 stops as he periodically crept back into the vicinity of Tiger Stadium.

He started at his alma mater in Natchitoches, La., then went to McNeese State in southwest Louisiana. After stints at Arkansas and Miami he returned to bayou country at Nicholls State, some 40 miles from where he grew up.

Then came stops at Syracuse, USC and Ole Miss (as head coach) before going to the NFL with the Saints, where he worked with McMahon – “one of my closest friends in coaching.”

Then came Tennessee and a second tenure at USC before landing at LSU in 2015.

“Everywhere I went,” Orgeron has said, “I was preparing to come back to LSU.”

Orgeron didn’t get his dream job the way he would have preferred and his eight-game tryout as interim head coach and the 15 games as full-time head coach haven’t always been great, though the opener against Miami was an eye-opener.

He has tweaked the staff he inherited when Les Miles was fired after a 2-2 start two years ago. Orgeron’s Louisiana guys have ties to McClendon and other former LSU head coaches Bill Arnsparger, Mike Archer and Miles, who brought in Orgeron to be his defensive line coach in 2015.

Miles was on his way to threatening McClendon’s wins record before LSU ran out of patience and replaced him with Orgeron.

The first two personnel moves Orgeron made were to bring defensive line coach Pete Jenkins, a top McClendon lieutenant, out of retirement, and install tight ends coach Ensminger, who played quarterback for McClendon, as offensive coordinator to replace Cam Cameron.

Two months later the interim title was removed from Orgeron’s title and he started formulating his staff going forward.

He promoted Johnson from graduate assistant to help Jenkins, who would later retire after the 2017 season, and added Joseph. He brought in Sullivan and McMahon as consultants before making each a full-time assistant during the offseason.

Even though LSU’s offense was significantly more productive under Ensminger than it had been under Cameron, Orgeron, feeling he needed to make a name hire, moved Ensminger back to tight ends coach and brought in Pitt offensive coordinator Matt Canada to be his coordinator in 2017.

Orgeron and Canada were never a good fit and they separated after last season. It took Orgeron even less time to promote Ensminger the second time than it had the first time.

If Orgeron has any regrets during his brief tenure, it’s a safe bet that No. 1 is his decision to hire Canada instead of sticking with Ensminger, a Baton Rouge native whom Orgeron called “a great, great Tiger” who “bleeds purple and gold.”

Now Canada is off doing his own interim thing at Maryland and Ensminger has his own dream job.

"This is my opportunity."

Steve Ensminger wants to score a lot of points, not do a lot of interviews. And @TimBrando expects the #LSU offense to be much better than it was with Matt Canada a season ago. pic.twitter.com/r5SI3tnCfT

— Jacques Doucet (@JacquesDoucet) August 30, 2018

Orgeron has known Ensminger since 1979 when Ensminger was sharing McClendon’s quarterback position with David Woodley. It was that year that No. 1-ranked USC came into Tiger Stadium, which was at its all-time Death Valley-est.

LSU led the defending national champions well into the fourth quarter before falling behind 17-12. The game ended that way, with Ensminger throwing two incompletions into the end zone.

The victory against Auburn in 1988 is known as “The Earthquake Game” because LSU’s last-minute, game-winning touchdown elicited a roar from the Tiger Stadium crowd that registered on a seismograph in the Geology department across campus.

But that USC game in ’79 had tremors that began before the opening kickoff and didn’t stop until Ensminger’s final pass fell incomplete.

That night, that era of LSU football, is in Ensminger’s blood, just as it is in Orgeron’s – as much as it can be in the blood of someone who never played for the Tigers.

Sullivan, who is at Ensminger’s side in the press box, was on Arnsparger’s staff in the mid-’80s when the program regained some luster in the decade after McClendon’s retirement.

Orgeron says Johnson simply “is a Tiger.”

Ensminger called the eight games for which he was coordinator in 2016 “the best time in my life.”

This is a season that could show that the LSU job isn’t just Orgeron’s “dream job” but also one he can thrive at, or a season in which the great expectations of Tigers football threaten to gobble him up.

As much as Orgeron has spiced up his staff with Louisiana guys, he’s smart enough to recognize coaching talent in individuals who don’t know boudain from a bootleg.

Orgeron and the university made a major financial commitment to Aranda, who Orgeron routinely calls “the best coordinator in America.”

The Tigers were ranked just 25th in the preseason poll before jumping to No. 11 after the opener and they face what looks to be one of the most challenging schedules in recent memory.

But Orgeron is comfortable.

“I worked all of my life for this opportunity,” he said.

And he has surrounded himself with coaches who can appreciate just what that means.

Les East

Les East is a New Orleans-based football writer who covers LSU for SaturdayDownSouth.com. Follow him on Twitter @Les_East.