Yesterday here at The Hayride, I had a post upbraiding the LSU message board and social media meltards and their legacy media facilitators over what should have been received as a rather humdrum story; namely, that Brian Kelly is suing LSU in order to, he hopes, get a judge in Baton Rouge to give him a declaratory judgement that he wasn’t fired for cause so that there’s no question his buyout is legally enforceable.

This is all a negotiating tactic. LSU is trying to get Kelly to take less than the just under $54 million he’s owed in that buyout; they’ve offered him $30 million in a lump sum, as opposed to $800,000 and change per month between now and the end of the contract in 2031, and Kelly refused.

Everybody knows that ultimately he’ll take less than the $54 million; the question is how much less. Frankly, none of this is all that compelling. Negotiations generally aren’t a spectator sport. But in this idiotic clickbait era, and especially when people have been conditioned to throw reason and intelligence to the wind and simply rage and melt down about This New Thing Today, what has been an especially dumb reaction on the part of LSU’s fan base since Kelly’s firing – that everybody wanted – got even worse this week.

There is an idiot at TigerDroppings, and yes, I am aware that taking the temperature of millions of people based on posts at TigerDroppings is less than scientific, who started a rather long thread in accusing Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry of intentionally sabotaging LSU because Landry graduated college at ULL. This apparently makes him some sort of Ragin’ Cajun Manchurian candidate sent to wipe out the flagship university in a suicide mission.

People don’t even bother thinking about things before they just go and post them.

And while the idiot in question did get mildly ratioed for his trouble, there were 54 people, as of my last check, who upvoted this retarded conspiracy theory.

The LSU fan base’s professed hatred of Landry is largely overblown, and it comes from two key sources. First, the blue-blood Baton Rouge crowd really doesn’t like the idea that there would be a coonass from the swamps of St. Martin Parish in the governor’s mansion and they especially don’t like the idea of a populist reform finding root at LSU – even if many or most of them don’t disagree with the ideological form such changes might take.

More on that in a minute.

Second, and related to the first, is that white Democrats in Louisiana have always considered LSU as their baby and sacred cow. So many of the white Democrat politicians who used to run Louisiana came up in student government at LSU, came out of LSU’s law school and so on, and furthermore there has, or had, been for a very long time a sense that if you could cover yourself in purple and gold you would get the middle and working class in Louisiana to buy in to your agenda regardless of how transgressive or socialist it may have been.

There is a reason, for example, that James Carville would go on TV and spew the most hateful, outlandish and provocative left-wing bilge while wearing LSU gear. It wasn’t an accident that he’d do that – the LSU gear was a signal to the folks back home that regardless of whatever politicking he might be doing on the boob tube, he’s just a regular guy like all y’all.

Eventually, people got wise to this stuff and eventually Carville got too old to be very marketable as a guest on CNN. But cloaking themselves in LSU has been a longtime practice for the white Democrats in this state.

A lot of whom turn out to be Baton Rouge bluebloods anyway.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t a lot of LSU people outside of these two groups griping at Landry. He did a couple of things in his first year in office that rubbed many LSU fans the wrong way. The first was when Landry griped that the women’s basketball team missed the playing of the national anthem at an NCAA tournament game because they were still in the locker room while Iowa’s team was there standing for it. That was an event management screwup more than it was evidence of a lack of patriotism by the Lady Tigers, and so Landry missed the mark a little with his objection. But on the other hand, it’s pretty common practice that LSU’s teams aren’t on the field or the court for the anthem, and nobody seems to remember when that became a thing.

And of course, there was Omar the Tiger.

Landry went out and found a semi-domesticated tiger in Florida whose owner was willing to bring him in to ride in the old tiger cage that Mike used to for the Alabama game last year, and the effort was panned as a cheap stunt and somehow an affront to Mike the Tiger.

But had it not been for the fact that Kelly’s team utterly laid an egg in that game and was abused by that Alabama team, Omar the Tiger could well have been feted as a hero and good omen.

We could have a discussion about why LSU has an antisocial live tiger mascot who lives far better than most Louisianans and can’t be lured into a cage with a mountain of beef while Omar was willing to do his job for him. Maybe people didn’t like Landry exposing Mike VII as a welfare tiger. But Kelly being exposed as a welfare football coach was a lot bigger PR problem.

The thing is, that PR problem shouldn’t be Landry’s, though it clearly is.

They’re angry at him not because sometimes he wades into controversies. He’s the governor and so he gets blamed, but what they’re angry about is that LSU is a mess.

And Jeff Landry didn’t make this mess. The people at the center of the attacks on Landry are the mess-makers.

John Bel Edwards was the governor of Louisiana for eight years when all of the stupid, terrible decisions were made that have blown up in LSU’s faces this year. And it’s Edwards’ friends and allies who have been busy ginning up as much bile against Landry as they could.

Am I saying that you’re an Edwards stooge if you don’t approve of Landry’s handling of what’s going on at LSU? No. But I would suggest that you examine why you aren’t happy.

Landry stirred up a lot of trouble for himself when he said, in a press conference called on another subject where he was asked an off-topic question about Kelly’s replacement, that he’d rather let Donald Trump pick LSU’s next football coach than then-athletic director Scott Woodward. Was it rather stunningly impolite that Landry would give Woodward such a bad haircut in front of the cameras? Without question.

But consider what Landry knew, and think about what your reaction would be.

First, there was the immediate situation, which was that Woodward had a blowup with Kelly on the Sunday after the Texas A&M game, which was rightly a career-ender for him, and fired him on the spot. Doing that without having done any preparation in advance – as in, building a file that could be used on Kelly in asserting he was being fired for cause – was a shockingly sloppy operational decision.

Next, the reason you heard about the meeting at the governor’s mansion later that day was that Woodward had triggered a $54 million obligation on LSU’s part that he had only rudimentary agreement on satisfying it. He wasn’t in a position to deliver Kelly a check for the full amount of his buyout when he fired him. So members of the Board of Supervisors and a couple of key money men then went to see the governor to strategize on next moves.

You can trust me on this, or you can disregard it, but I can tell you that Landry has more than enough to do than to have LSU’s football coaching situation thrown in his lap. Especially in circumstances like these where he’s now being asked to shepherd, in the absence of a school president who would be the true responsible party, the firing of a coach, the negotiation and payment of his buyout, what to do with the athletic director who signed that contract and now the procurement of a new coach.

Landry is a big LSU fan. He’s also a politician of some degree of skill. As such, he knows it is absolutely not in his interest to be responsible for finding a football coach for LSU whom everybody is going to like. Such an animal barely exists in the wild. Even Nick Saban and Skip Bertman had detractors.

Landry had to hire a president at LSU because the previous occupant of that job, Bill Tate, who has been held up as a great leader of the university when he was anything but, had run out of town over the summer when he realized that a Republican governor and the appointees to his Board of Supervisors were going to begin getting serious about scrubbing woke indoctrination out of the university.

And Landry was criticized for “meddling” in the process which produced Wade Rousse as LSU’s president, whom they’re saying was unqualified for the job because Rousse had only been the president at tiny McNeese State. Tate had never been a school president at all; he’d been a DEI hire underling at South Carolina, and a couple of other places, before he got the job  at LSU.

Bill Tate’s scholarly resume consisted of a bunch of papers he’d written along the lines of critical race theory, essentially positing the theory that math is racist. He wasn’t on LSU’s list of finalists, and then he was parachuted in and hired courtesy of John Bel Edwards’ influence as governor and Edwards’ favorite on the board, James Williams, an attorney from New Orleans whose claim to fame was that he was one of the lawyers for the family of Michael Brown, of Ferguson, Missouri fame, who crafted the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” lie.

Tate was explicitly a racial hire. His qualifications, had he been white, would never have resulted in his getting the LSU job. It turned out that he wasn’t the overt DEI race-baiter it was expected he would be; he was more like Winston Zeddimore, Ernie Hudson’s character in the original Ghostbusters, whose worldview was quite malleable…

The problem was that under Tate’s predecessor F. King Alexander, LSU had already started down the path of being a woke indoctrination factory, and so Tate didn’t have to change anything at all in order for the school to continue down that path. And he didn’t.

LSU had already blown the bottom out of its admissions standards by adopting a “holistic admissions” policy, meaning applicants didn’t even have to submit standardized test scores. Under Tate it got even worse; LSU began prioritizing admissions of first-generation college students, which was a rather sneaky way of radically transforming the student body along racial lines.

The official numbers for this year aren’t out yet, but there are people at LSU who will tell you that the student body is more than 25 percent black. The next most “diverse” student body in the SEC is Mississippi State at nine percent. And it isn’t that under Bill Tate LSU went out and gathered up all the Thomas Sowells and Condoleeza Rices they could find. LSU isn’t stealing black students from Harvard and Stanford, but rather from Southern and Grambling.

Which helps no one, by the way. Southern is struggling terribly with its enrollment. LSU’s academic standards are suffering – they’ll tell you the student body has never been more qualified, but talk to faculty members there privately and they’ll tell you it’s horrifying how poor the quality of some of these students are. And the kids can’t handle the work, meaning that either they won’t graduate and they’ve wasted their tuition money, or they’ll be coddled to graduation and their degree value will be discounted.

Tate knew that Landry was going to try to fix this, and so he bolted for Rutgers, taking a cadre of wokesters from LSU with him and leaving LSU leaderless just in time for Kelly to face-plant in his fourth season when he was supposed to have his best team.

With a contract that Woodward “negotiated” – which is another way to say that Kelly’s agent, who is also Woodward’s agent, dictated to LSU through Woodward.

Did you know that Kelly’s “walkaway” buyout, meaning the figure he would have to pay LSU should he have taken another job, started at $4 million, then dropped to $3 million and finally to $2 million, went to nothing in the event Woodward would no longer be the AD?

It isn’t a big thing, and it’s not an unheard-of clause in a college football coach’s contract, but it’s the kind of thing a good athletic director negotiating a contract of that size would have to balk at. If you’re Scott Woodward, you really don’t want to be in a situation where your boosters and board members look at contracts you’ve negotiated and come to the idea that you’ve placed your hands around the university’s throat. And yet he let Kelly’s agent – his agent – put that provision in a contract paying $95 million to Kelly over 10 years, with 90 percent guaranteed.

And Bill Tate signed off on it, and so did the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Every single one of whom had been appointed by John Bel Edwards.

The current athletic director Verge Ausberry, who was Woodward’s #2 in the department, has been criticized for his role in having sat on an allegation that a wide receiver on the football team was beating his tennis-player girlfriend rather than putting the allegation up the university chain of command. Ausberry gave the information to the athletic department’s compliance director, who didn’t do anything about it until the tennis player went to a trainer about her injuries.

Everybody told her to dump the wide receiver. She didn’t. Then it became a scandal and Ausberry ultimately was made the scapegoat.

But what nobody talks about is the fact that the wide receiver, whose name was Drake Davis, grew up in the house of one Jim Bernhard, the mega-rich founder of The Shaw Group, former chair of the Louisiana Democrat Party, a frequently-mentioned potential candidate for governor or senator, large-scale LSU athletic booster and major sponsor and crony of John Bel Edwards.

And you think Verge Ausberry had a choice other than to sit on those allegations? Why is Verge Ausberry the bad guy rather than Edwards or Bernhard, who created the circumstances under which he rationally chose to sit on them?

Kelly’s contract turns out to be the worst mistake by an athletic director in college football history. Yes, Jimbo Fisher’s buyout at Texas A&M was a worse situation, and Woodward was associated with that. The circumstances should be understood, though – Woodward had signed Fisher to a 10-year, $75 million contract while AD at Texas A&M, and three years into that contract Fisher was winning. Woodward left Texas A&M and went to LSU, and Fisher’s agent put out the word that Woodward was going to hire Fisher for what was rumored to be 10 years and $120 million. At that point, the new AD Ross Bjork gave Fisher the extension that ultimately cost that school more than $75 million when Fisher was bought out.

But even had the extension not been made, Woodward’s initial contract with Fisher would have cost Texas A&M more than $35 million to buy out when he was fired. That would have made it one of the three or four worst in college football history.

Woodward also gave Ed Orgeron a raise and an extension after the journeyman coach hired in a fit of frustration by previous AD Joe Alleva after his top choice Tom Herman opted to sign with Texas instead of LSU won a national championship in 2019. That was a crowning moment for LSU and Orgeron, and the coach certainly deserved a reward for delivering on such a scale. Except right after the season and while his new deal was being negotiated, Orgeron filed for divorce against his wife amid some terrible rumors about their marital problems, and stories and pictures began emerging about the coach’s cavorting with much younger women.

With that going on, you give Ed Orgeron a bonus. Maybe a raise. Even an extension. You guarantee absolutely nothing, because it’s quite apparent that he’s about to destroy all of the success he’s built based on the stupid decisions he’s making.

“Hold my beer,” said Scott Woodward, and he gave Orgeron a new contract with a guarantee. Two years later, LSU was on the hook for $17 million in dead money when Orgeron had crashed the program and had to be fired.

Then he hired Kelly with zero vetting – any investigation at all would have easily turned up the fact that Kelly had already built a retirement home and was telling people at Notre Dame that he only expected to coach a couple more years – and gave him a 10-year guaranteed contract.

Which Bill Tate signed off on, and so did the Board.

All appointed by John Bel Edwards.

This is a very long post. But I could make it a whole lot longer. This only scratches the surface of the shitshow that LSU is digging out from thanks to a decade of horrific management at its top levels.

Jeff Landry is in his second year as governor and his first year of having any real authority over LSU in terms of having some control over the Board of Supervisors or input into the university’s top personnel. Rousse and Chancellor James Dalton literally just got there.

And somehow this mess is Landry’s fault?

Anyone who tells you this is either badly uninformed, misinformed, or one of the misinformers.

Landry may yet earn the scorn of the LSU faithful. But as of today, if that scorn is not dumped primarily at Edwards’ doorstep it isn’t justly dumped at all.