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DAN WOLKEN
Ed Orgeron

Opinion: LSU football needed to move on from Ed Orgeron's drama and self-destructive impulses

Dan Wolken
USA TODAY

Just shy of five years ago, on the day Ed Orgeron was made LSU’s permanent head coach, there was no shortage of people in the college athletics industry predicting his downfall.

Orgeron, the larger-than-life Cajun with a one-of-a-kind voice and Red Bull flowing through his bulging veins, was not exactly an unknown commodity. For all of his cartoonishly endearing qualities, there was another side to Coach O that anyone who had worked around him knew all too well: The temper, the propensity to meddle in areas where he didn’t have expertise, the inability to internalize his stress and put everyone else in the building at ease. 

For nearly a decade after his crash-and-burn at Ole Miss, Orgeron worked hard to create a narrative that he had fundamentally changed. But among those who hired coaches, nobody was willing to give him a second chance — that is, until LSU ran out of ideas in November 2016 and figured the job was so good that even Orgeron could make it work.