You’ve got to hand it to LSU Athletics Director Skip Bertman. When he makes a promise, the former baseball coach delivers.
In his first Cyber-Side Chat back in May 2003, Bertman proposed a vision for the future of LSU athletics. He wanted it “to be one of the top five athletics programs in the nation — year in and year out — for the next quarter of a century.”
With the men’s and women’s indoor track teams both garnering national championships, the school’s total number of national titles is up to 43. The plan has worked. The NCAA ranks LSU No. 6 in overall national titles through fall 2003, but it lists the school with 38 titles, not including the two recent track titles, two football titles and one men’s basketball title.
Bertman said the big catalyst for making LSU a top-flight athletics program was to upgrade the “aging” athletic facilities and build new ones, which would attract more blue-chip recruits, leading to wins and eventually championships.
To pay for all the needed facilities and renovations — including repairing the leaky roof of the PMAC, a large renovation to the west side of Tiger Stadium and a Taj Mahal-like football-only complex that had to be built to appease coach Nick Saban — surcharges were added to football season tickets, beginning in 2004.
I, along with a minority on campus, was skeptical of a plan to charge fans a lot of extra money because, if teams didn’t win, it could have easily backfired if fans stopped showing up for games.
But, Bertman helped LSU win five of those 43 titles as baseball coach, and when he gives any type of speech about winning a championship, he’ll say how it’s the “coming together of human forces at exactly the right time to exactly the right degree.”
So far, LSU’s other sports have been following the formula.
Football’s national title really put LSU on the map in the national media, forcing analysts and other would-be “experts” to mention the Tigers without the words “backwoods” or “swamp” in the same sentence. With the No. 2 recruiting class in the nation, and Saban signed for the rest of the decade, LSU will continue to make an impact in the most dominant of all college sports.
The baseball team is No. 1 in the country and looks solid for a return trip to Omaha, if not for a sixth championship. Softball is in the top five and has regained its form from two years ago, when the Tigers reeled off four-consecutive SEC titles and finished third in the 2001 Women’s College World Series.
Gymnastics is ranked No. 5 and appears headed to the Super Six in Los Angeles.
The women’s basketball team has a good spot in the NCAA Tournament and could be a sleeper to make it to its first-ever Final Four.
The latest track titles boosted coach Pat Henry’s number of titles to 27. Men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s tennis and soccer all had winning records.
Then there’s men’s basketball, the stubborn child in Bertman’s great plan of LSU dominance. The team showed promise early in the season, but folded down the stretch and was shut out of the NCAA Tournament, having to settle for the NIT.
While most LSU sports are on the fast track to success, I guess all those “human forces” couldn’t quite blend together for John Brady this year. Maybe next year he’ll get the memo.