COLLEGE STATION — Texas A&M athletic director Scott Woodward is headed home to LSU, and that’s got some Aggies in a lather.

Not because they’re overly concerned about losing an athletic director — but because of who he is tied to. Woodward hired Jimbo Fisher from Florida State and had worked with the popular Aggies coach at LSU around the turn of the century.

Woodward, who has been at A&M since January 2016, grew up in Baton Rouge, La., and attended LSU, which on Wednesday reassigned longtime athletic director Joe Alleva to “special assistant to the president of LSU for donor relations.”

That opened the door for Woodward, who hasn’t worked at LSU since 2004, to head home. While his hire at his alma mater hasn’t been officially announced, multiple people with knowledge of the situation said Woodward is exiting A&M for LSU, a move first reported by TexAgs.com.

Last August, in an extended visit with the Houston Chronicle, Woodward said, “I have no intention and no desire to go anywhere else” when asked what he would do if he heard “mama calling” back at LSU (as Paul “Bear” Bryant once famously put it when leaving A&M for his alma mater Alabama).

“People forget that I’ve been gone (nearly) 15 years now,” said Woodward, hired by A&M from the University of Washington. “I love it here. I love the people, the university and the commitment to education. Until they don’t want me, I want to be here.”

The concern for A&M fans is that Woodward would one day try to hire Fisher for the LSU post, should current coach Ed Orgeron not pan out. Fisher does not have a buyout in his A&M contract paying $7.5 million annually over 10 years, and neither side would owe the other anything if he walked away from it.

Woodward’s prior relationship with Fisher stemmed from when Fisher served as offensive coordinator under then-LSU coach Nick Saban and Woodward was a university liaison between then-LSU chancellor Mark Emmert and Saban. Fisher would invite Woodward to sit in on offensive meetings.

“I would stay after practice sometimes and just follow the coaches into their team meetings — but not the defensive ones,” Woodward said. “That just wasn’t coach Saban’s thing. But I’d go into Jimbo’s meetings, and he was ecstatic to have me. I’d go in there and watch a little ball and learn.

“It was just a fun experience for me, and it was good for me, too, to show the football staff that, ‘Hey, I support you, and we support what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.’”

Fisher took note of the curious go-between who’d later be his boss at A&M.

“Scott would just sit in the back of the room and see what we were doing,” Fisher said last summer. “It was an example of a good administrator taking interest — he wasn’t trying to be (nosy). He was interested in what you were doing, and he liked the ball. That was really good in that relationship.”

Fisher added that Woodward’s keen interest helped the liaison grasp exactly what a program needed to be successful in the Southeastern Conference.

“He always understood that from an administrative standpoint,” Fisher said. “Some people might have said, ‘Why exactly would you need that?’ They could not comprehend it, especially if it seemed like it might be something that seemed a little goofy, as one who didn’t understand the recruiting aspect of the game.

“Scott understood what we understood.”

All of that adds up to why Fisher, who’s in the second year of his contract, likely will play a role in determining the Aggies’ next athletic director. Fisher led A&M (9-4) to at least nine victories for the first time since 2013 and had one of the nation’s top recruiting classes this past winter.

New A&M basketball coach Buzz Williams, hired from Virginia Tech earlier this month, also cited a budding relationship with Woodward as a reason he decided to make the leap back to his home state (Williams grew up in Van Alstyne and was a former A&M assistant under Billy Gillispie).

While Woodward gets plenty of credit for those hires, he wouldn’t have been able to make either one without an open checkbook courtesy of A&M supporters. Fisher and Williams ($3.8 million annually) rank among the top-paid college coaches in their respective sports.

The notion that Woodward had an endless supply of money to throw around at A&M is not correct. Administrators have urged fiscal responsibility with the man who was roundly criticized for leaving Washington with an unforeseen $14.8 million debt.

According to the Seattle Times in June 2016, six months after Woodward left, he “did not let the governing board know about a growing deficit in the UW athletic department’s budget.”

According to the article, “Regent Jeremy Jaech … described it as a ‘bad-faith effort’ on Woodward’s part to use one-time money, paid in advance to UW for multimedia advertising, and apply it to the budget. Jaech called it ‘an attempt to make the numbers look better than they really were.’”

brent.zwerneman@chron.com

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