Three things happened at LSU yesterday which have put to rest a lot of questions about the university’s leadership heading into the future. And from an outside view of the reaction, it seemed like the first two were fairly well received.

The last one, maybe not quite so much.

We’re speaking, of course, about the dual hire at the top of the LSU leadership structure, that being McNeese State President Wade Rousse named as LSU’s new president while University of Alabama Provost James Dalton was hired as the new chancellor of LSU’s main campus and related institutions.

The LSU Board of Supervisors had been kicking around the idea of re-separating the jobs of president and chancellor, something which gained steam with the University of New Orleans rejoining the LSU system after an ill-conceived exit into the University of Louisiana system several years ago. And with the Board really taking a shine to both Rousse and Dalton as candidates for the job of president, it was a great opportunity to drop in a big infusion of talent and forward thinking into the institution.

Rousse is an academic – he has a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, which he earned while working as an economist for the Chicago Fed some years ago – but he’s more than that. He’s built and sold businesses, he’s been something of a venture capitalist, and he’s been in university administration. And he’s been a success everywhere he’s been.

One of the things you notice when reviewing his curriculum vitae is he’s a bit of an out-of-the-box thinker and he recognizes and seizes opportunities when they arise. The two most obvious items showing this are recent occurrences from Rousse’s time at McNeese – he was instrumental in hiring Will Wade as the school’s basketball coach, which literally put McNeese State on the map given that Wade led a moribund program to the NCAA Tournament twice in two years with one of the most stunning turnarounds in college basketball history, and he built an LNG Center For Excellence there to take advantage of Lake Charles’ prominence as a hub for natural gas exports.

Making McNeese into Natural Gas University when the metro area surrounding the campus is driven by that industry is a no-brainer, but the environmental Left lost their minds over Rousse doing it. Most university administrators, the people the national search firms would present as “respected in their fields” and recommend LSU hire, would shy away from such an endeavor for fear of being canceled. Rousse charged ahead.

There wasn’t really a credible argument to be made opposing Rousse. One argument that was made was that he came from a small school and hadn’t been president long. Except Bill Tate, his predecessor, hadn’t ever been a university president. The other argument was that Rousse’s research background wasn’t the strongest. Tate, of course, had a long list of scholarly articles about topics like why math is racist.

But those arguments were canceled by re-splitting the job into two and hiring Dalton, who comes from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and has a much more traditional academic background including a lot of research and research supervision.

So the academic side of LSU is actually in really good hands at the moment. And it’s very reasonable to think LSU has the kind of leadership that will begin to approximate what it lost when Mark Emmert moved on a little more than 20 years ago (and never was able to get back).

Rousse was named the fifth member of LSU’s search committee for a football coach to replace Brian Kelly on Tuesday. Then the guy running the committee, interim athletic director Verge Ausberry, got a bump up to full-time AD.

Which set a lot of the meltards off.

Ausberry has two major things which make people unhappy. One was his getting mixed up in the Title IX Husch Blackwell mess a few years ago at LSU and having to take a month’s sabbatical, plus he had to watch the 2021 football season on TV rather than go to the games, for his involvement in it. The other is that he’s been in charge of LSU’s football scheduling the past few years, and because of that he’s been blamed for the fact the football team went five straight years losing the season opener (it’s not really his fault; it was Brian Kelly’s fault for not having his team ready to play the first game, but if your coach is too lazy to run a proper fall camp you might need to account for that in making the schedule).

Are those criticisms disqualifying, or even fair?

Well, on the Title IX issue, the key item Ausberry was accused of had to do with former wide receiver Drake Davis and his penchant for beating the crap out of his girlfriend, who was on the tennis team at the time. Ausberry knew about what was happening, but he didn’t tell the cops or the Title IX office or anybody until two weeks later, when she went to see a trainer about her injuries.

Drake Davis, in case our readers forgot or weren’t aware, is the biological son of former LSU basketball player Lester Earl – whose recruitment led to the end of Dale Brown’s tenure as coach and resulted in draconian sanctions inflicted on the program. Davis didn’t grow up with his father. Instead, he grew up, in substantial part, in the house of Jim Bernhard, the former chair of the Louisiana Democrat Party, founder and CEO of The Shaw Group, close friend of then-governor John Bel Edwards and massive LSU athletics booster.

It’s not exactly Ausberry’s finest moment to sit on the domestic issues of Davis and his girlfriend whose lousy taste in men left a mark, but on the other hand he’s not the worst guy in that fiasco for hoping (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) that the problem would go away without making a federal case out of it.

What we can say about Verge is he’s LSU through and through, and he worked his way up from a job as a fundraiser at TAF to be the #2 man in the athletic department under Scott Woodward, and he played his political cards perfectly when Woodward’s wretched fiscal excesses and political shenanigans of his own led to his demise. Ausberry made Rousse comfortable, and the latter saw him as somebody he could work with as he takes an active role in the structuring of athletics.

Much as Emmert did, especially when he first got to LSU.

So now, Rousse and Ausberry and the other members of the football coach search committee (LSU Board member and big-time trial lawyer John Carmouche, former player, parent of two players and sizable booster Ben Bordelon, CEO of Bollinger Shipyards, and E.J. Kuiper, the president and CEO of Our Lady of the Lake Health System) are going to pick a coach.

It isn’t going to be Nick Saban. Ausberry said as much in a radio interview Monday. He’s an old friend of Saban’s from the latter’s time at LSU and still talks to him, and Ausberry opined that Saban’s wife would kill him rather than let him get back into coaching.

Realistically, while having Saban back as LSU’s football coach is an unscratched itch for most of the fan base, particularly as it suffered to see Saban’s success at Alabama, it isn’t a great idea to pursue his return. Saban is 74, 10 years older than Kelly, and he’s an admitted burnout case who’d want even more money than Kelly was making in order to take the job. It’s really not the kind of hire LSU ought to be looking for.

Lane Kiffin, Saban’s former offensive coordinator at Alabama and Ole Miss’ current head coach who seems to be having his best year at the moment, might be closer to the mark. Except Kiffin’s agent Jimmy Sexton is going to reset the college coaching market with Kiffin, and it’s almost certainly going to take a contract even crazier than the one Woodward hung himself on with Kelly in order to land him.

Think something like $120 million over 10 years, guaranteed.

LSU can’t agree to anything like that. It would be absolute insanity to do it.

The only way you’d agree to guaranteeing a long-term contract like that would be after you’ve seen your coach in action at your school and you’re convinced he’s everything you hoped he would be. SMU just gave Rhett Lashlee a 7-year extension, for example. Indiana just gave Curt Cignetti an 8-year extension. Because both schools know they’ve got great coaches worth holding onto. Giving a coach that kind of contract essentially sight unseen is what Woodward would do, and it rightly got him fired.

If Kiffin would take a six-year, $60 million contract, LSU should hire him on the spot. If he’d take a five-year, $70 million contract, sign him up. But guarantee nothing, or at most $10 million, of such a contract.

Why would he need a guarantee? He’s winning at Ole Miss. The point of coming to LSU is that he thinks LSU already has everything he’d need to win at an even greater level here. A coach who thinks this is a better opportunity than he has at another school in the conference which has (arguably, if not demonstrably) been more successful than LSU has over the past six years wouldn’t require a guarantee unless he thinks his performance here would get worse.

Why would Kiffin think that?

The only things that come to mind are other reasons why from LSU’s perspective you wouldn’t want to offer a giant guarantee.

Namely, that when he was younger, Kiffin had a problem with drinking. And that he’s also had some marital issues that it sounds like he’s been cleaning up with his ex-wife, who he recently moved to Oxford for a reconciliation.

We’d say that it sounds like he’s doing much better with his personal life and that he’s matured and that it’s great that he’s done so. What gives us pause is LSU hasn’t had a football this century who wasn’t engaged in alcohol abuse, marital infidelity or both, and in multiple cases those things have weighed down the performance of the program.

That isn’t a reason to shy away from Kiffin. It’s a reason to reject Sexton’s demands for a guaranteed long-term contract. Let him come for a big salary on something a little shorter and if it works out, THEN do the big contract.

And Kiffin might not leave Ole Miss for that. Or he might opt to go to Florida, who is also in the market for a coach.

If it’s not Saban or Kiffin, then whom?

And the real answer at this point is “I don’t know.”

Nor should any of us.

There’s a month left in the college football season, and a smart search committee is going to treat the home stretch as a crucible for a lot of coaches who might not be so well known at the moment but could rise to the top over the course of this month.

I’d be surprised, and the meltards would lose their minds, if interim head coach Frank Wilson ended up getting the job. Even if Wilson beat Alabama on Saturday (unlikely but not impossible) and finished the season on an undefeated run, he’s still been unsuccessful in stints at Texas-San Antonio and McNeese State and you simply can’t qualify to be LSU’s head coach if that’s your record. That’s a no, and while there is idle chitchat about the possibility it isn’t going to happen.

But beyond that, there is a wide universe of coaches to examine.

Kenny Dillingham at Arizona State, Jedd Fisch at Washington. P.J. Fleck at Minnesota. Eli Drinkwitz at Missouri. Josh Heupel at Tennessee, if he’d consider leaving. Brent Key at Georgia Tech. Joey McGuire at Texas Tech. Matt Campbell at Iowa State. Eric Miller at North Texas. Willie Fritz at Houston. John Sumrall at Tulane. Will Stein, the offensive coordinator at Oregon. Detroit Lions defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard, a former LSU linebacker. There are lots of others. All of them have at least four more games to show off their wares, and the LSU search committee should be watching.

And the meltards should consider not melting. LSU has its leadership in place. Let’s give them time and space to operate.