LSU's Ed Orgeron almost got kicked off his college team; now he's a state hero

Brent Schrotenboer | USA TODAY

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NATCHITOCHES, La. — Long before he became the beloved head football coach at undefeated LSU, this is where Ed Orgeron made some of the dumbest mistakes of his life and nearly threw away his future, according to local legend.

It was late 1982. Orgeron had just finished his junior season as a football player at the local university, Northwestern State. But he was on thin ice. He already had quit LSU as a freshman because he was homesick and didn’t like it there. Then after he joined NSU about 180 miles up the road, he had earned a reputation as a hell-raising, curfew-busting barroom brawler.

A new coach had just been hired, Sam Goodwin, who considered kicking him off the team, along with his roommate, after they were accused of trashing a dorm room.

The school’s housing director “took me into this one room, and every piece of furniture in there was broke,” Goodwin recalled this week as Orgeron prepared LSU for the national championship game against Clemson Monday in New Orleans.

“Just a total disaster,” he said. “He told me two of my players did all that, and it wasn’t the first time they had done it. One of them was Bébé Orgeron, and the other Bryan Arceneaux, both of them from South Lafourche.”

What happened next is one of those choices that can change the rest of a person’s life. Nearly 40 years later, it’s also one of the many stories that make up the local folklore of a man nicknamed Bébé (pronounced Bay-Bay), a Louisiana hero whose success has set off a wave of pride throughout the state, especially here, where the university community is still riding the huge highs and lows of the past two weeks.

On Dec. 28, another beloved Northwestern State graduate, Carley McCord, was among five who died after their plane crashed after takeoff in Lafayette. She was a sports reporter, 30 years old, and was headed to Atlanta for the Peach Bowl, where LSU beat Oklahoma under the direction of Orgeron and her father-in-law, Steve Ensminger, LSU’s offensive coordinator.

“It’s a part of us that will be playing in that game on Monday,” Northwestern State President Chris Maggio said of Orgeron. “It is bigger than just a head coach of a university. Everybody in Louisiana can really identify with him, identify with his love for the state, his love and his passion and really rallying everybody together. All at the same time, our world was kind of crushed when we heard the news about Carley. She was just a phenomenal young woman with such a bright future.”

After McCord was laid to rest last week in her hometown of Baton Rouge, these are the emotional connections that stretch across the state on the eve of Monday’s game. They flow from the Superdome in New Orleans, back to Baton Rouge and the LSU campus, and then up here to Natchitoches (pronounced Nak-a-dish), the oldest permanent settlement in the Louisiana Purchase territory and the filming site of the 1989 movie “Steel Magnolias.”

A number of big-time sports stars have launched from here, where the population now is about 18,000. Fomer NBA player Joe Dumars played at Natchitoches Central High. At Northwestern State, the history includes Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Lee Smith (then a basketball player), the heroic late NFL running back Joe Delaney and former New Orleans Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert, who is better known locally these days for another reason.

He was Orgeron’s former teammate from high school at South Lafourche, and then again at Northwestern State, where the two were also roommates. Hebert is why Orgeron came here after quitting LSU before his freshman season in 1979 and returning home to South Louisiana, where he dug ditches for a phone company.

Hebert got in touch with him and said, “I know if you come here, you can play.”

“The rest is history,” Hebert told USA TODAY Sports this week.

And that history is something else, to hear it from the locals.

Back then, “if you went to a bar, you knew Bébé,” said David Stamey, an Northwestern State grad now serving as the Clerk of the Court for Natchitoches Parish.

“We were playing hard, both on and off the field,” said Hebert, who came to NSU because the Demons offered him a scholarship.

Orgeron’s reputation preceded him with the new coach in late 1982.

`Alligator chasers’

Goodwin had heard about him and Arceneaux, another Cajun from South Louisiana. Then came his meeting with them about the dorm room.

“I was expecting to see a couple of alligator chasers, filthy and uncouth and undisciplined and the whole bit,” Goodwin told USA TODAY Sports this week. “I was totally shocked. They dressed really nice, very polite, clean-cut, and it messed with my mind a little bit -- what I was seeing in one place (at the dorm) and what I was seeing in another. We had a good visit, and I was going to give them one more chance.”

Arceneaux disputes breaking any furniture. “We kept a messy room,” Arceneaux said this week. "We were hellraisers in the dorm.”

He doesn’t dispute that he and Orgeron had reached a crossroads in that meeting with Goodwin, who might have been looking to make a disciplinary statement soon after his hiring. “He was going to kick us off the team,” Arceneaux said.

And what if he did?

“I hate to even think about what would have happened with (Orgeron),” said Arceneaux. “That was his second chance. I don’t even want to talk about that.”

Orgeron, a defensive lineman, might have left college again. He might not have graduated from Northwestern State, as he did in 1984. He might not have started his coaching career, as he did on the Demons staff that same year. He instead might have moved on to his other known occupations, digging ditches and shoveling shrimp in South Louisiana, instead of ending up as the gruff-talking, brawny father figure of the No. 1 team in the nation.

Orgeron, now 58 and LSU’s head coach since 2016, remembered that moment when asked about it Saturday by USA TODAY Sports. He said he didn’t know what might have happened to his future if he got kicked off the team.

“Everybody deserves a second chance,” he said. “You know, we learn. We mature. That’s why we need coaches.”

He said he crossed a line with Goodwin.

“He brought me in and said, `Don’t cross it again,” said Orgeron, whose team beat Northwestern State 65-14 in Baton Rouge on Sept. 14. “Guess what? I didn’t. So I’m very appreciative of that, and I’m very appreciative of him drawing the line and make me do the right thing. That taught me that I needed it right there.”

Orgeron finished the 1983 season as the team’s inaugural winner of the Joe Delaney Memorial Leadership Award, named after the teammate who drowned that June trying to save three children, two of whom also died.

By finishing college and showing such leadership, he created the foothold he needed to start his coaching career, though it didn’t end his alcohol-related, hell-raising ways.

The gift of time

He received probation after being charged with simple battery related to a fight outside a bar in Natchitoches in 1984. Then in 1991, a woman in Florida was granted a restraining order against him, which was terminated in 1992 after he completed a program on domestic violence, according to multiple reports. That same year, he was arrested for head-butting a man at a bar in Baton Rouge, though charges were eventually dropped at the man’s request.

The latter led him to lose his job as an assistant coach at Miami (Fla.) in 1993, before he returned to Northwestern State as a volunteer coach under Goodwin. It didn’t last much more than a few weeks. Goodwin said the school administration didn’t want Orgeron around after that, leading him back to South Louisiana and Nicholls State, where he started to build his career back. He said he realized he needed to change, leading him to quit drinking. He married his wife Kelly in 1997, settled down with three sons and stayed sober.

But it all could have fallen apart much earlier, before he built a network of supporters in coaching to help buttress his career.

“I’d hate to figure it out if he had got out of football,” said Bill Johnson, Orgeron’s defensive line coach at LSU who also was Orgeron’s position coach at Northwestern State when Orgeron played for the Demons.

Johnson was a holdover on the coaching staff when Goodwin took over in 1982. He remembers pleading the case for Orgeron and Arceneaux during a staff meeting with Goodwin before Goodwin met with them.

“It was like, `Oh wait a minute now. You’ve just got to get to know these old boys,’” said Johnson, who helped Orgeron get his first two coaching jobs, first at Northwestern State in 1984, then as assistant at McNeese State in 1985. “To this day they love each other.”

In the end, Orgeron’s tenure in Natchitoches showed how even the dumbest mistakes in college don’t have to define or ruin a life if given the time to make better choices and build something better. At the same time, McCord’s death 37 years later serves as another reminder that nobody knows how much time they’ll get to do that.

Her death stunned Northwestern State, where she was known for her energetic friendliness and ambition – and where a memorial scholarship is being established in her name. Johnson called McCord a “great Demon girl,” referring to school’s mascot.

McCord worked as an in-house media host for the Saints and New Orleans Pelicans, as well several other sports media jobs, including at the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame in Natchitoches.

Doug Ireland, Northwestern State’s recently retired sports information director, worked with her as chair of the Hall of Fame. “It’s been a heartbreaking thing, and it’s a constant topic of conversation,” he said a few days after her death.

Orgeron and LSU might help provide a diversion from that, at least momentarily. Given the gift of time and more chances, he’s shown what can happen as a result.

“He’s shown how people can change their lives,” Arceneaux said. “And he pulled the state together like no one’s ever done.”

Follow reporter Brent Schrotenboer @Schrotenboer. E-mail: bschrotenb@usatoday.com