bingewatches

There are a number of reasons that Ed Orgeron is going to be leaving LSU at the end of this season, as the school and football coach worked out terms of his departure on Sunday morning. For one, since winning a national title in January 2020, the Tigers have been downright mediocre on the field, posting a 9-8 record and falling completely out of contention in the SEC West.

Beyond the poor performance on the field, there was the investigation from a year ago into organizational culture within the program that revealed the team had failed to follow proper protocols when it came to rape and sexual harassment allegations against players like Derrius Guice. And on top of all of that, Orgeron committed the cardinal sin of any football coach: he crossed the wrong people higher up. Football programs at both the college and professional levels will willfully look the other way on a lot of things, which is among the larger overall issues with the sport as a whole, but making enemies out of the people with hiring and firing power is the surest way to get yourself ousted.

Much like Jon Gruden’s emails, which contained horrific language offending many groups and people but reached the point of no return by lobbing that hateful language towards commissioner Roger Goodell, one of the ways Orgeron pushed his way across the line by reportedly trying to hit on the pregnant wife of a high-ranking LSU official, per The Athletic’s Brody Miller.

It created messes for him, like the time Orgeron pulled up to a woman at a gas station wearing exercise attire. “Hey, you look like you work out,” he said, according to multiple sources. “We could work out together.” The woman informed Orgeron she was married and pregnant, to which he responded, “Why does that matter?”

That woman was the wife of a high-ranking LSU official. Word of this reached the LSU Board of Supervisors, the collection of prominent Louisiana attorneys and business owners appointed by the governor who make the most important decisions at LSU. And of course, it reached LSU athletic director Scott Woodward.

Following up on that report that Orgeron, who filed for divorce from his wife of 23 years weeks after winning the national title, became distracted by chasing women in the past two years was this one, which stated he would bring some of those women to practices to the point the distraction became one for the whole team.

This wasn’t the lone factor in Orgeron’s ouster from LSU, but it would stand to reason that it played a role in accelerating the timeline for his dismissal and made it so things couldn’t be repaired even if things on the field turned around, something that is evidenced by this all coming a day after the Tigers beat Florida.