As I woke up Tuesday morning to the awful news of Paul Dietzel’s death, old and young alike seemed united in their mourning of the revered former coach and athletic director.
And while that’s admirable, it’s unlikely the younger, Tiger fans knew exactly who they were tweeting condolences for.
It’s not their fault. No student — and most of their parents — weren’t around for Dietzel’s rejuvenation of a dormant LSU football program in the mid-1950s
Given the reins of a team considered a blip on the Baton Rouge radar at only 30 years old in 1955, Dietzel didn’t immediately dazzle.
His team stumbled to a combined 6-12-2 record in his first two seasons.
Stop for a second. Six wins in two seasons. In today’s college football landscape, teams with six wins in two seasons get uninterested followings, two-star recruits and endless derision from fans and media alike.
I wasn’t there, so I can’t say if Dietzel faced those challenges. But given the circumstances around the program when he inherited it, one can infer the situations were similar.
Nevertheless, Dietzel shrugged off skepticism, nabbed a guy named Billy Cannon and rode his zany coaching ideas to the promised land.
He employed the novel idea that players could play on both sides of the ball, rotating in separate teams of players to keep fresh legs going. One group, the Chinese Bandits, is still etched in LSU lore.
With this newfound strategy, Dietzel became the first coach to lead LSU to a national championship in 1958. One year later, Cannon, the man who carried Dietzel’s team to that title, was rewarded handsomely, becoming LSU’s only Heisman Trophy winner.
Two years later, Dietzel said he would “never leave LSU.” But the allure of West Point was too much to pass up, and Baton Rouge’s football icon and Army Air Corps veteran left the Tigers to become the first non-Army graduate to lead its football team.
Yet there was no outrage. None of the baseless, moronic jabbering I heard when Nick Saban got a promotion and chose to leave LSU. Or the same clamoring when Les Miles beats a team by 21 and not 41.
There was perspective in 1961. LSU fans, alumni and faculty remembered just six years ago when LSU football was as much a laughing stock as it was a spectacle.
When Dietzel departed for West Point he left a streak of four straight winning seasons at LSU. A Dietzel staffer named Charles McClendon stepped in and, with Dietzel’s core foundation, rattled off 12 winning seasons in a row to bring the streak to 14.
Spanning the Saban and Miles era, the Tigers’ current streak is at 12 winning seasons.
So, the next time Miles sits on a 17-point lead, finishes 9-3 or calls a bubble screen fans disagree with, I challenge you to remember the
Dietzel days.
Remember when 9-3 caused city-wide celebration, and when a 17-point lead was unfathomable.
And most importantly, remember the man who started it all.
Chandler Rome is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Baton Rouge.