JD: What is your football gameday routine?
ME: On home games, my wife and I have lots of social obligations that go along with the game. We use football games to promote the university by working with donors and political leaders. We’ll go over to the game usually a couple of hours before kickoff and spend a little bit of time among the tailgaters. We started the Chancellor’s Tailgating Award this year. Each game we pick out at least one sometimes two groups of tailgaters to give awards to. The hard part about the gameday routine for me is that I don’t get to pay as much attention to the football game as I want because I am always entertaining all these guests and taken care of them. But the fourth quarter, I always reserve for Mark Emmert. I always go down on the field for the fourth quarter and watch the game on the field with the team. Then go on to the locker room with the kids and Coach Saban.
JD: Do you usually travel to see the Tigers play for road games?
ME: Because the gameday routine is so demanding, I love going to road games for football because I usually only have just a few guests along. Ironically, I get to watch more football away from Tiger Stadium than in Tiger Stadium. I’ll go to a number of the games this year: Arizona, South Carolina, Ole Miss and Alabama.
JD: How is athletics important to the university and its mission of education?
ME: Athletics is important to the university on a number of levels. On the most superficial level, it is incredibly powerful tool for sheer visibility. Look at the Georgia game and having GameDay here on campus. The early numbers suggest that 50 million Americans over the course of the day looked at LSU on their television. That’s a huge cross section of this country. Many of whom never even thought about LSU. Now they have had some very positive exposure to LSU. Having GameDay here was terrific and the campus looked good on TV. So just as a marketing device, it is an incredible tool. But much more importantly than that, it also ends up providing a social glue that holds the university community together by giving us an emotional, fun and exciting bond for the community. Then of course you can’t overlook the fact it provides educational opportunities for lots of kids, many of whom are on scholarships. So it all fits together very nicely.
JD: What’s the biggest difference between athletics at LSU from other universities where you have worked?
ME: I think there is not a lot of difference in kind. It is more of a difference in intensity. If you think about the University of Connecticut, they go basketball crazy up there and for good reason. But when you compare that to the intensity of emotion and attention that is in the state of Louisiana for a LSU football game or when our basketball team is making a run or when the baseball team is doing something special, everything is bigger and larger down here. There are very few universities in the country that are as committed to and engaged by their sports programs.
JD: What is your favorite LSU athletic moment?
ME: Well, there has been a lot during 4 1/2 years already. But if I had to pick one it would be Brad Cresse driving in the winning run in the 2000 College World Series.
JD: Did you grow up playing sports or even just as a sports fan? What is your favorite to watch or even play?
ME: I liked a lot of sports. I grew up playing basketball and I ran track and played tennis a lot. As a spectator, I really enjoy watching basketball and football. But to play a sport, I really enjoy golf.
JD: Well thanks so much for your time.
ME: Thank you.