Ed Orgeron's Road to the LSU Job Begins Now

Ed Orgeron believes he's going to be named the permanent head coach at Louisiana State University.

We know this because Orgeron said so, and he said so because he's self-aware enough to understand that he is the rarest of college football commodities: someone we'll never get tired of hearing from.

Orgeron has been coaching college football since the 1980s and in the 90s cemented himself as one of the sport's more familiar personas, which means everyone knows his bag by now. He guzzles Red Bull and recruits like a demon and spouts aphorisms in a gumbo-soaked drawl, and he does all of it at maximum volume, a human train whistle piercing every environment he passes through.

But he also has reinvented himself in a rather significant way, thawing from an angry grizzly into a steadfast papa bear. The taskmaster has become loveable. Unsurprisingly, Orgeron's players swear by him and so does the media, ever grateful for his culture of transparency and penchant for unspooling ribbons of good quote. He is an endearingly simple man, one who fumbles his way through explaining injury reports—"I'm not a doctor, that's for sure," he recently shrugged—and doesn't bother to project the secrecy that consumes many of his contemporaries and overcomplicates what should be a straightforward game. He epitomizes football without subtext and that, as much as his ability, has allowed him to occupy college football's spotlight without wearing out his welcome.

So a lot of people would be tickled to see Orgeron, who has been serving as LSU's interim head coach since Les Miles was fired nearly a month ago, stick as the man in charge at his home state school—provided he earns it. To do so, he'll have to battle a fifth of this week's AP Top 25 over the next six weeks, beginning on Saturday with a home date against Ole Miss.

There are more reasons to believe the Tigers can pull this off than there are to doubt them. The longer the season drags on, the better their two losses age: we now know how little shame there is in losing to Wisconsin at Lambeau Field, while Auburn has looked positively dangerous since upending LSU in one of the season's quirkiest endings.

This may well be a very good team, in other words, and there is plenty of talent at Orgeron's disposal. Orgeron ousted offensive coordinator Cam Cameron shortly after taking over, but there won't be much to write home about at the quarterback position for a while yet; it will take months to delouse all of Cameron's rotten development and even worse schemes, not weeks.

Most everything else, however, is shipshape. In Leonard Fournette, the Tigers boast the most physically gifted running back since Adrian Peterson, and in Derrius Guice they have an understudy who would start for most other schools south of the Mason-Dixon line. The offensive line is producing at a top-ten level, and the defensive line features Arden Key, perhaps the most unsung great pass rusher in a conference flush with them. The back seven is a constellation of four- and five-star recruits, as is the receiving corps. LSU can win this way. The latter part of Les Miles' tenure was defined by it.

The opposition, meanwhile, can certainly fall prey to it. Ole Miss is especially susceptible to LSU's brand of football, conceding 4.7 yards per rush attempt, which ranks 93rd nationally. Arkansas and Florida brandish lower-fidelity versions of LSU's style, all bash with even less flash. The Tigers, better than any team besides Alabama, possess the athletes to hang with Texas A&M's fleet of pass catchers, and can combine it with the sort of edge rush that UCLA and Tennessee deployed to push the Aggies to the limit. None of those matchups are a cinch, but all are winnable. The fifth game—against Alabama, in Baton Rouge—probably isn't, but should Orgeron upend the Crimson Tide, as a source told ESPN's Chris Low, "[LSU] might sign him to a new contract before midnight."

Beyond an upset of Nick Saban, what's the bright line for hiring Orgeron? Going 4-1 against those teams would seemingly clinch it; perhaps 3-2 would, too, if it's the right combination of games. But Orgeron has experienced a near miss before: at USC, the school that never loved him as much as he loved it. When the Trojans passed him over after a 6-2 stint as interim coach in 2013, the party line held that eight games was too small a sample size to overcome Orgeron's 10-25 record at Ole Miss, no matter how many tweaks and adaptions he had made to his approach. Do it again at LSU, however, and suddenly Oxford is the outlier—which makes sense when considering Orgeron was a rookie head coach tasked with dignifying what was then the conference doormat.

All Orgeron has to do is gut out the next month and a half, and he will achieve everything he's worked for. He made no bones about holding out for a head-coaching job after things went south at USC, only for no viable offers materialize. His landing at LSU as defensive line coach and recruiting coordinator, his familiar titles, was a milestone only for the way it brought him back to the school where, as a homesick freshman, he had transferred away from. This wasn't supposed to happen and yet, as soon as Miles was fired, it had to happen. Of course Ed Orgeron would be in charge of LSU, the only Power Five school in America where he may not seem Cajun enough. The only thing more fitting would be for Orgeron to finish the job, and make good on his ambitions at the place he once fled.

It would make for an uncharacteristically pat ending for the famously rough-edged son of the Bayou, but Orgeron has never had a problem breaking from script. He'll let you know about it, too.

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