LSU hired North Texas coach and former Tiger assistant Johnny Jones on Friday as its next head basketball coach.
Mere days after former coach Trent Johnson left for Texas Christian, Jones was the last candidate standing and a home-state hire to boot.
Jones went 190-146 with two NCAA Tournament appearances during his 11 seasons with the Mean Green. The DeRidder, La., native was 91-88 in Sun Belt play and never won a regular-season conference championship, but helped turn a downtrodden North Texas program into a consistent 20-game winner.
His hiring also marks a link back to the heyday of LSU basketball.
Jones played on the 1981 Tiger squad that made the Final Four and was an assistant coach on Dale Brown’s staff for the 1986 Final Four run. The former guard still ranks 11th on LSU’s all-time assists list.
“I am pleased to welcome Johnny Jones back to Baton Rouge where he helped build a winner and where I am confident he will once again build a winner and bring excitement back to the Maravich Center,” said LSU Athletic Director Joe Alleva in a news release.
Details of Jones’ salary and contract are currently unavailable, and Alleva declined comment to The Daily Reveille on Friday night at LSU’s home baseball game.
Johnson was a West Coast native largely unfamiliar with the area’s recruiting, but Jones’ 16 years with the program was a key reason behind former coach Dale Brown’s and former player Collis Temple Sr.’s endorsements.
Jones, who also served as Memphis’ interim coach during the 1999-2000 season, said he wants to bring local flair back to LSU basketball.
“I am extremely excited about this opportunity and I can’t wait to get back there to Baton Rouge and LSU to get started,” Jones said Friday evening in a news release. “This is certainly a dream come true to return to a place that has so many memories for me. We will hit the ground running on recruiting with five scholarship spots available for this coming year and then in the near future I will begin to put together a championship staff for our program.”
He is the only person to both play and coach in a Final Four at LSU.
Jones was heavily involved in recruiting LSU greats Chris Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal and Randy Livingston to LSU during the late 1980s and ’90s.
Jones’ hiring comes after four days of dalliances with names like Pitt coach Jamie Dixon, Minnesota coach Tubby Smith, Murray State’s Steve Prohm and Harvard’s Tommy Amaker.
His name has also been a contentious one around the program since his rumored role in the Lester Earl scandal that put LSU on probation and effectively concluded Brown’s career in the late 1990s.
Jones was later cleared of any violations or wrongdoing by Earl and the NCAA.
LSU went 18-15 in 2011-12 and reached the National Invitational Tournament, where the Tigers fell to Oregon in the first round.
Johnson was 67-64 in four seasons in Baton Rouge, with an SEC title in 2009.
Jones is 202-162 overall in 12 seasons as a head coach.
His teams have been the highest scoring in the Sun Belt during each of the last two seasons and the Mean Green’s offense finished in the top-70 nationally eight times during his tenure in Denton, Texas.
LSU averaged 65.4 points last season, ranking 227th in the country, but did finish among the nation’s top-90 defensive units.
 
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Contact Chris Abshire at [email protected]