While Nick Saban has had success in his first four seasons at LSU, guiding the team to a Southeastern Conference championship, three bowl appearances and the Tigers’ best start in 30 years, one man laid the foundation for that to happen.
Gerry DiNardo brought back the magic.
Now the head coach at Indiana University in Bloomington, a position he took over in January 2002, DiNardo has compiled a 4-17 record, including 1-8 (0-5 Big Ten) this year. Despite those struggles, DiNardo is still optimistic about his chances of turning around a program that’s always had to compete with basketball for fans and money.
“Our mission is to find a way for both basketball and football to exist,” DiNardo said in a phone interview. “We’ve seen every school in the Big Ten win the conference title the last 10 or 15 years with the exception of Michigan State, Indiana and Minnesota, so there are other schools that have won it.
“We have to find a way to be successful regardless of the other sports. We don’t want their success to drop off. We just want to be a part of it.”
DiNardo coached the Tigers from 1995-1999, compiling a 32-24-1 record with three bowl victories and a 10-win season. But as quickly as DiNardo ascended to near god-like status in Baton Rouge, things turned south for him just as fast. DiNardo never finished the 1999 season, being fired prior to the season finale against Arkansas.
DiNardo reflected back on his time as LSU’s coach with mixed emotions.
“Any time you get fired it’s a very difficult situation,” DiNardo said. “It was very tough for me personally. It was the first time it had happened to me and it was difficult for my family. I don’t know that you ever get completely over it. I had my opportunity and I wish I’d done some things different and I think I could have done some things better. I don’t blame anybody for what happened in any of those five years. I was the leader of that program and I’ll take the credit for when it was good and the blame for when it was bad.”
In 1994, LSU was coming off a 4-7 campaign and six straight losing seasons under Curley Hallman and Mike Archer. Hallman was fired shortly after and then-athletic director Joe Dean began a national search for a new coach. Dean said he went after several top candidates, including then-North Carolina coach Mack Brown, Kansas State’s Bill Snyder and Lou Holtz, who was at Notre Dame.
“When you’re the athletic director, you start out trying to attract the top people, but when you can’t get a big name coach you have to move on with assistant coaches,” Dean said. “It’s very complicated. What fans don’t realize is not everyone wants to be the LSU football coach.”
When his first choices turned him down, Dean narrowed his choices down to then-TCU coach Pat Sullivan and DiNardo, who was Vanderbilt’s coach and had guided the Commodores to a 19-25 record in four seasons. In the end, Dean said his final decision was easy because of each coach’s contract situation.
“Gerry DiNardo blew me away in the interview,” Dean said. “We did not have to have out DiNardo’s contract. I asked him about it and he said it was his problem, not LSU. If we had gone with Sullivan, we would have had to pay TCU.”
DiNardo, who played at Notre Dame and won a national title as an assistant coach at Colorado, made his presence at LSU known immediately. After losing the 1995 season opener to No. 3 Texas A&M 33-17 in College Station, the team reeled off three straight wins, including a dramatic 12-6 win over No. 5 Auburn in Tiger Stadium. The win vaulted LSU back into the Top 25 for the first time since November 1991, and the game has become known as the “Bring Back the Magic” game.
The Tigers finished the year 7-4-1 and ended it with a 45-26 win in the Independence Bowl over Michigan State, a team then coached by Saban.
DiNardo said the team was able to have success so early because it already had good players on the roster.
“We certainly had the talent when we got there,” DiNardo said. “Curley and LSU should take credit for that because I believe a coach is important in the decision process on where to go to school. But in a place like LSU will have high school players, particularly in Louisiana, go there regardless of who the coach was. I say that when Curly was there, when I was there and now that Nick [Saban] is there. It’s a fact of life there, that people grow up wanting to be a Tiger.”
After a 10-2 campaign in 1996, including a 10-7 win over Clemson in the Peach Bowl, the 1997 season had promise. After losing to Auburn 31-28, LSU was ranked No. 14 heading into its Oct. 11 matchup with top-ranked Florida. The Gators, the defending national champions and owners of a 25-game SEC road winning streak, fell behind early and lost 28-21.
As fans rushed the field and tore down the goalposts after what some call the biggest win in school history, DiNardo’s popularity was sky high and the program was being recognized on the national level.
“It was a great win because [ESPN] GameDay was there,” DiNardo said. “The week before, we had just barely beaten Vanderbilt, 7-6. I can remember at the press conference saying the toughest decision that Florida would have would be which open receiver to throw the ball to. I told my team I said that to sort of set the stage, not because that’s what I believed, and sure enough we played terrific pass defense that day and our offensive coaches put together a terrific plan and put some new plays in and it was a lot of fun.”
The thrill of the win, which still is LSU’s only victory over a No. 1-ranked team, lasted only a week. The Tigers lost to Ole Miss, 36-21 the following week and finished the season 9-3.
With high expectations at the beginning of the 1998 season, the Tigers were thrust in the national spotlight with a No. 6 ranking and a big game against Georgia. But a 28-27 loss to the Bulldogs started a losing trend that culminated in a 4-7 season. DiNardo said he could not point to one thing that contributed to the team’s spiral, but a variety of things such as losing some of his assistant coaches and player turnover were a big part of it.
“In ’98 we had a veteran offensive team coming back, but we had lost some key guys on defense,” he said. “If I look at it from a technical standpoint, we just couldn’t do some things defensively, especially in pass rush, that we’d done in the earlier years.”
Things continued downhill for the Tigers in 1999. After winning its first two games, LSU lost eight straight games and DiNardo was let go following a 20-7 loss to Houston in Tiger Stadium. Under interim coach Hal Hunter, LSU upset the Razorbacks 35-10 in the season’s last game in Death Valley.
DiNardo said he had an idea he was going to be fired sometime in that season.
“I think when the chancellor said he wanted to make a change, that gave me the idea that I was leaving,” he said.
Former LSU wide receiver Abram Booty, who played under DiNardo for three seasons, said DiNardo lost touch with the players during his final season.
“I felt coming in that we were pretty close,” Booty said. “We grew apart as time went on, and then at the end coach DiNardo didn’t really have a relationship with anyone on the team.”
Several players had run-ins with the law during DiNardo’s time, including wide receiver Larry Foster and running back Cecil Collins. Foster was arrested for felony purse snatching in September 1999 after alledgedly stealing a girl’s purse near Himes Hall in the Quad. Collins now is serving 15 years in the South Bay Correctional Facility in Miami for a burglary conviction after breaking in his neighbor’s window and watching her sleep.
DiNardo said many of the player problems he’s seen are because schools are not as focused on education of student athletes as they used to be.
“I think the most difficult thing that’s changed since I started coaching in 1975 is that we have moved further and further away from the academic and educational experience,” DiNardo said. “When your decisions aren’t necessarily based on what’s best for the student athletes academically and based on other things such as professional athletics, it becomes more difficult to deal with some of the outside distractions.
“There was a time when the outside distractions weren’t allowed to be a part of it. Now, they aren’t only allowed to be a part of it, but they’re oftentimes encouraged either by the university, the coaching, the student athlete or the family.”
Dean, who also was involved in hiring Saban to replace DiNardo, said the team’s problems at the time were fixable.
“He [DiNardo] realized there was a staff problem, and had he stayed I believe he could have fixed those problems,” Dean said.
After leaving LSU, DiNardo took a job with the upstart XFL, a football league founded by NBC and WWF founder Vince McMahon. DiNardo coached the Birmingham Bolts to a 2-8 record in the league’s only season. Despite the league folding, DiNardo said the experience of coaching a professional team helped him and he enjoyed some of the differences in the XFL and the college game.
“The pro game is significantly different because you’re with your players all day long and you can do more,” DiNardo said. “There’s no academic pressure whatsoever, so you don’t have this other part of the individual’s life that’s not only a concern, but when you’re in the education business, it’s a priority. In college, you’re really dealing with the second most important thing in the athlete’s life where as in the pro game, you’re dealing with the most important thing in their life.”