Brian Kelly at LSU: Is cultural fit a legit question? Look at Saban, DiNardo

BATON ROUGE, La. — It made no sense to Nick Saban. He’d hear people say it and he’d drop his pen and look out over his glasses to give that look of disapproval. He’d jingle some change in frustration. Didn’t they know that was the problem? Didn’t they understand that was the entire reason he was here?

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But that’s the way we’ve always done it.

“That was the hardest thing for him to drive home to everyone when he started at LSU,” former LSU strength coach Tommy Moffitt said. “‘That’s why we’ve got to change. You can’t do something the same way.’”

LSU didn’t hire Saban in 1999 because everything was working well. LSU hired Saban from Michigan State to change how things were done. LSU had eight losing seasons in the previous 11 years. Saban demanded an increase in LSU’s commitment, from funds to facilities to structure. He changed how the entire program was run, from a notoriously underachieving sleeping giant to a national champion, within four years.

Nobody was talking about whether Saban — this NFL guy from West Virginia and the Big Ten — would fit within the South Louisiana culture. Saban was there to change the culture.

But from the moment LSU hired Brian Kelly on Nov. 29, the primary questions revolved around fit and culture. Observers wondered if the winningest active college coach who’d never worked farther south than Cincinnati could really adapt to the Bible belt and the SEC. It’s a discussion primarily launched on a national level about the unprecedented move from Notre Dame to LSU and how he’d fit in Baton Rouge. People actually at LSU have found it confusing.

“The two winningest coaches in the modern SEC history were quote-unquote ‘not cultural fits’ in Nick Saban from West Virginia and Urban Meyer from the midwest and Utah,” LSU athletic director Scott Woodward said.

Longtime Baton Rouge radio presence Charles Hanagriff finds it baffling. He ran through the list of great LSU coaches and struggled to think of many actually from Louisiana. Legendary baseball coach Skip Bertman came from Miami. Hall of Fame men’s basketball coach Dale Brown was from North Dakota, and fellow Hall of Fame women’s coach Sue Gunter from Mississippi. Count Les Miles as a Michigan man, and Paul Dietzel came from Ohio. Then there’s Gerry DiNardo, a Brooklyn native who revived the program for a time.

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“I wonder,” Hanagriff said, “is that a narrative so much because the last guy was sold so much as a culture fit?”

There is no denying South Louisiana as a multicultural hotbed of Cajun and Creole with distinct food, infamous corruption and an encouraged practice of recreational drinking. It is different, a part of the continental United States that feels like a foreign way of living. And its favorite Cajun son Ed Orgeron represented it well, even taking the Tigers to an undefeated national title.

But building LSU football back into an SEC power might not come from a coach who is of the culture. It will be a coach who can create the culture.

“This is not Bear Bryant’s SEC anymore,” said Woodward, who signed Kelly to a 10-year contract of $100 million. “This is a national power brand that’s the best conference in all of college athletics, and it’s going to take someone with special skill sets. I think that’s much more paramount than cultural fits.”

DiNardo and former athletic director Joe Dean were beckoned to the governor’s mansion for breakfast one morning in the late 1990s with Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster. DiNardo had the Tigers back in the top 15 after a decade of losing.

Football and politics are often intertwined in Louisiana. Former Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long tried to speak to the team during a 1934 game, leading to coach Biff Jones’ resignation. Current Gov. John Bel Edwards developed a close friendship with Orgeron. Former Gov. Edwin Edwards even called DiNardo when he got the LSU job in 1994 to congratulate him. So on this morning, DiNardo, Dean and LSU president Allen Copping had breakfast with Foster, joking around and talking ball.

As the meal finished up, Foster turned to DiNardo and said, “Coach, let’s go talk in the kitchen for a second.”

They walked through the swinging barn doors, and while DiNardo won’t divulge everything said in that kitchen, he recalled the governor privately pushing him to sign a contract extension. DiNardo did, a deal that stretched from 1997 through 2002. He was fired by 1999 with a 32-24-1 record.

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“It’s crazy,” DiNardo told The Athletic. “That’s how extreme it is.”

DiNardo arrived at LSU not as its first choice, but as a Yankee who played at Notre Dame, primarily coached up north and who didn’t have a winning season in four years at Vanderbilt. He stood out even more than Kelly, and he had to sell himself far more.

So he went on what amounted to a grassroots campaign to connect with the state after predecessors Mike Archer and Curley Hallman produced six consecutive losing seasons. “We literally put together a calendar that would just kill you,” DiNardo said. “It was almost every night, on the (Tiger Athletic Foundation) plane, we’re going to all the functions. We had one in the Superdome. Just one thing after another.”

He set out on a mission to stop at every high school in Louisiana. Every. Single. One. He had graduate assistants drive him, showing up at the first school of the day before the coaches at 7 a.m. and going from one school to another until 4 p.m. Then maybe they’d meet more coaches at a restaurant or bar from 4 to 5 p.m. “I could knock out 11 schools a day,” he said. And over his first three years, he really did stop at every school, no matter if they had impressive recruits.

“Gerry was on a barnstorming tour,” Hanagriff said, “and if you didn’t know who he was when he was hired, you would have had to have been under a rock not to know who he was after that tour.”

That helped DiNardo, who opened his tenure with an epic opening speech built around “Bring Back the Magic” to Tiger Stadium. He also made a savvy acknowledgment that he had to leave the news conference for an important recruiting visit, sparking reporters to follow him as operations man Sam Nader drove DiNardo an hour west to Carencro High School to see a superstar running back named Kevin Faulk. Once DiNardo landed Faulk, he won most of Louisiana over. For a while.

Still, DiNardo never found the culture element to be a problem. If anything, he found his Italian culture perfectly intertwined with the South Louisiana way of life. He grew up in an ethnic area with immigrant grandparents and family members who didn’t speak English. “The common denominator was food and family and all that. Well, to me, that’s kinda Louisiana,” he said.

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“This was before 2016 when the country wasn’t split and politics wasn’t a problem for everyone, but for me and my family, food was important. I grew up Catholic. There was a Catholic population. We owned a restaurant. All those things, when we were winning, it just made it better.”

And what all this leaves out is that DiNardo won, quickly. He won seven games in Year 1, then went 10-2 and 9-3 the next two seasons while sharing SEC West titles both years and finishing in the top 15. It’s why he had a governor pressuring him to sign a contract extension. But then LSU hired a new chancellor in Mark Emmert — now the head of the NCAA — and DiNardo went 6-15 the next two years in 1998 and 1999.

“It was great, until you start losing,” DiNardo said. “Then, none of it matters. That’s what you’re there for, right? You’re there to win football games.”

“If you’re winning,” said Moffitt, who worked at LSU from 2000 to 2021, “nobody cares if you’re a nice coach, nobody cares if you’re a northerner, nobody cares if you’re a southerner, nobody cares if you’re a hard worker or you might have a bad actor on the team. Nobody cares. All they care about is winning, man. When you’re not winning, they tear you apart.”

Moffitt took a second and tried remembering if there were major southern recruiting ties on Saban’s first staff. Offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher and O-line coach Rick Trickett were also from West Virginia. Defensive coordinator Phil Elmassian hailed from Massachusetts and linebackers coach Sal Sunseri from Pittsburgh. Of the other assistants, Mel Tucker was an Ohio man, Stan Hixon a Florida guy who played at Iowa State. Michael Haywood came from Houston but played at Notre Dame. Derek Dooley was from Athens, Ga., but went to school in Virginia, to which Moffitt laughed and said, “He came across as, uh, maybe from Virginia.”

The staff Saban brought in that launched LSU’s two-decade “Golden Era” did not come off as an obvious fit. Most of them were coming from smaller jobs, too, with Moffitt joining from Miami as the only big-school hire.

Hires are about what a school needs in that moment. DiNardo was the right man to bring energy to LSU, and he boosted LSU’s in-state recruiting. And when Saban came, LSU needed somebody to raise its aspirations.

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“LSU had a reputation for doing things on the cheap, and Joe Dean was really at the forefront of that,” Hanagriff said of the late athletic director. “Dean was brought in to fix (former athletic director) Bob Brodhead’s financial mess.” Dean did his job, getting LSU back in the financial black, but it also meant hires that underwhelmed the masses like Hallman from Southern Miss in 1990 and DiNardo from a losing program at Vanderbilt. LSU fit into the second tier of the SEC, and Saban leaving a top-10 Michigan State team for the bayou wasn’t an obvious step up.

As former longtime college football coach Gary Pinkel told John Talty in his book, “The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban,” when Pinkel asked Saban why he’d leave Michigan State, he said, “I’ll never be Michigan.”

“He knew you had to go to a place that has all the resources to be great,” Pinkel told Talty. “LSU is one of them. Alabama is on that same list. There’s about 10 of them in the country.”

Saban was hired by Emmert and Dean with a vision for how to tap into those resources. Yes, Louisiana was a talent-rich state with no Power 5 competitors in its borders, but LSU didn’t have the kind of facilities Saban wanted. He demanded promises for new buildings like the Cox Center for Academics and the eventual state-of-the-art LSU Football Operations Building. Emmert insisted on not going cheap on the Saban hire, and LSU hiring him for an unprecedented $1.2 million made a statement it was going to commit.

LSU dominating in recruiting is a baseline expectation in the modern era, but out-of-state schools were crushing LSU in recruiting before DiNardo and Saban made up that ground. Nebraska landed the Joseph brothers. Tennessee got Peyton Manning and top offensive tackle Jarvis Reado. Kordell Stewart went to Colorado, and countless others went to Notre Dame, Florida State, Miami, even Michigan.

These problems weren’t fixed by guys from Louisiana. They were fixed by outsiders.

Not a miracle. Not lucky.

Mentally and Physically Better. pic.twitter.com/53Ca5QHmvK

— LSU Football (@LSUfootball) October 2, 2022

“So they had to overhaul really everything that they were doing, because all the things that make LSU this program that they are now, these fantastic facilities, they didn’t have them,” Hanagriff said. “This winning tradition over two decades, at that time they didn’t have it. And locking down, as much as you can, the recruiting base in Louisiana, even in a ‘bad’ year right now, they are doing more than they were doing in the late 80s and into the 90s.”

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The improved facilities and the increased commitment led to better recruiting, and Saban steadily built his own culture. Moffitt went back to how Saban didn’t keep many holdovers on staff, bringing in new people with new ideas who didn’t have to be told what to do. Saban coached the coaches, who then integrated that culture throughout the program.

Sound familiar? Kelly got rid of the overwhelming majority of the LSU staff, from coaches to operations to recruiting, and that includes Moffitt. He even delayed his new staff news conference two months because he said he wanted to get himself and his staff on the same page.

“That’s why Brian Kelly did what he had to do,” Moffitt said, “because he didn’t want anybody saying to him, ‘That’s the way we did it.’”

Kelly’s first 10 months in Baton Rouge have been about process, habits and a compilation of the little things that create a winning program. Moffitt said Saban regularly used the analogy of throwing mud on the wall and some of it sticks and some falls down. You keep picking it up and keep throwing it and after doing it over and over and it all sticks on the wall.

And in the moments after LSU came back from down 17-0 to beat Auburn on the road two weeks ago, Kelly wasn’t happy with the football LSU played, but he was thrilled with what it showed about that process.

“This win is a culmination of doing the little things right all the time,” Kelly said in the locker room. “This is a program win. You do not play the way we played today and go on the road and win these games. It doesn’t happen. … You won this game, because mentally and physically you do things the right way.”

Woodward gets it. He does. He loves telling the story of selling peanuts as a boy in Tiger Stadium. He’s Baton Rouge-raised, went to LSU, worked at LSU (with Saban and Emmert), made it to the top of the profession and then came back to LSU. He’s one of the more Baton Rouge people you’ll ever meet, “so I don’t want to discount environment,” he said.

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But he said the discussion is skewed. “You’ve got to understand the environment, and Brian Kelly knew more about LSU when I talked to him than I ever could have imagined.”

He laughed at how much homework Kelly did, having studied the details of the community, the culture, where he wanted to be, what he planned on doing at LSU and how.

“I didn’t have to do a sales job,” Woodward said. “He knew everything that mattered and would happen, what our community is and what this university means to this conference. I mean, it was just like, ‘Wow.’ He was reciting my pitch.”

But between the lines of Woodward’s words and Kelly’s understanding is why Kelly really made sense at LSU to all parties involved. Like Woodward said, “This isn’t Bear Bryant’s SEC anymore.” And what he’s really getting at is how the SEC is no longer a regional conference. It is one of the preeminent conferences in the sport, and its top programs are the national powers. If LSU is often ranked in the top five jobs in college football by national experts, why would it hire by thinking small? It needed to think like a national power.

Woodward has built a reputation as the most prominent hirer in college athletics. He got Chris Petersen to leave Boise State for Washington. He got Fisher and Buzz Williams to Texas A&M, and then he got Kelly and Kim Mulkey to LSU. In a time when there’s a constant national seesaw of hiring the scheme guy or the recruiting guy, the young guy or the experienced one, Woodward has his own philosophy.

“I’m looking for a high IQ guy that covers the whole waterfront, who cares about our kids, who cares about what and how they finish their careers, has enormous success, wants to be here and wants to do it the right way,” he said. “They all sound like cliches but it’s true. The basis of it is hiring a very smart, high IQ guy.”

And hiring Kelly represents the parallel to the Saban hire 23 years ago. They appear so similar, two process-obsessed CEOs who’ve mastered the ability to build a structured program. But they are also so different. Saban came to take a program with potential and build it into a power. Kelly came because LSU is a power, and it needs a grown-up who knows how to get the most out of it.

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Kelly wasn’t part of the normal line of thinking. He was a somewhat self-made coach, becoming Grand Valley State’s head coach at 29, winning two Division II national titles at the Michigan school before taking Cincinnati to the Orange Bowl and Sugar Bowl and winning 113 games at Notre Dame. He’s not a part of any coaching tree. He is the tree.

Maybe some of the “culture” conversation is really about whether he can recruit in the South, an understandable question considering he’s never had a base here. His first signing day, he held onto the centerpieces of Orgeron’s 2022 class like five-star quarterback Walker Howard and five-star offensive tackle Will Campbell. He then shocked many by landing five-star Houston linebacker Harold Perkins, the No. 8 player in the country, a sign maybe Kelly could win tough SEC battles. He’s received some criticism for the fact LSU appears to be missing on six of the top 10 players in Louisiana in 2023. But LSU has the No. 7 class in the country, per the 247Sports Composite, with eight top-150 commits and 16 in the top 250.

Woodward reemphasized that the coach, whether it be Saban or Kelly, is there to build the culture.

“Nick and Brian are both very highly adaptable,” he said. “They’ll change, and they’ll see things and they’ll understand modern things happening in the game and with kids. They see it early, and people don’t see that.”

And that’s really what this entire thing is about. It’s about adapting and building and finding ways to always improve. So when looking at the Kelly hire, don’t mention the way LSU used to do things.

Editor’s note: This story is part of the 2022 edition of the Secrets of the Coaching Carousel series exploring unique aspects of college football coaching changes and more.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Top photos: Andy Lyons, Chris Graythen / Getty)

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