LSU Football: The good and bad of the Ed Orgeron situation

The news of LSU football planning to scrap Ed Orgeron after this season has given the college football world multiple signals.

According to Sports Illustrated’s Ross Dellenger, the LSU Tigers have come to terms on a separation agreement with head coach Ed Orgeron stating that he will not return to the football program after their current season has concluded.

As with just about every other time the news of a coach’s “firing” breaks, there are both good and bad takeaways for Orgeron, and the same can be said for the LSU football team and its fanatics.

Regarding what this means for coach “O,” he will obviously be able to find success coaching elsewhere; it’s not as if his career has collapsed (that is pivotal to remember for any coach in his shoes).

While Orgeron may not have been LSU’s cup of tea for the long run, he still proved the coaching prowess that he possesses in his time there, which began back in 2016. There are plenty of teams who are not happy with their current predicament, and Orgeron has certainly turned all of their heads today.

But before we move on to the LSU football program itself, I believe that everyone needs to get on the same page about coach “O,” and that is by acknowledging that his coaching has its limits. In other words, 2019 was not the status quo for Orgeron’s Tigers.

Now, this should certainly come across as common sense, as the vast majority of people have admitted that the 2019 championship run was nothing more than one miraculous season, or “lightning in a bottle.” Personally, I would compare it to the 2013 Florida State Seminoles with Jimbo Fisher.

However, that did not stop some folks from coming at me on social media, claiming that I was disrespecting Orgeron by calling him a “good” coach and nothing more. They went on to say that I would see just how great LSU football was going to be this season. Uh-huh.

So with where LSU now finds itself, I think it’s fair to say that we can drop the whole “Orgeron is an all-time coach” talk. He’s not, and this agreement that he’s had to reach with the Tigers has officially confirmed that.

Now that we can focus solely on what this means for the team, let’s go ahead and put it out there that they, too, will survive this verdict. They have some of the best talent in the country year-in and year-out; that trend will not change just because a new coach has come into town.

Even if the new guy is not an outstanding recruiter, LSU football has a reputation for being an NFL factory and their guys get noticed regardless of how they execute as a unit. Prospects know this, so a new face shouldn’t scare them off if Louisiana State is already on their minds.

What LSU fans will need to remember, though, is that there is a noteworthy difference between “surviving” and “thriving.” Especially when playing in the SEC West, chances are that the Tigers will have to climb their way up some and that it will not happen overnight.

Once again, that may seem like common sense, but both the fans and the school itself have illustrated that they demand perfection or, at the very least, darn close to it. That’s why they were discussing this whole separation thing not even two years after their historic 2019 run, along with publicizing it after beating a top-20 Florida squad. They were so fed up with their situation that a ranked victory couldn’t put this news off by even a week or two.

So what we’ve all learned here today is pretty straightforward: Ed Orgeron and LSU will both bounce back from this parting eventually, but the notion that either of them were going to see the pinnacle of excellence for any season beyond 2019’s was ridiculous–and that will only be proven further as the fallout of this move manifests.