Coach O, we'll hardly know ya

Gonna be so sad when LSU inevitably disappoints Orgeron again because the boosters are gonna demand a Big Name Guy.

The Tigers had signed him to a football scholarship out of South Lafourche High in 1979 and brought him to training camp as a freshman lineman. But homesickness soon drove the small-town kid back to the bayou.

His father, in the construction business, put him to work the next day.

“I was digging ditches by the side of the road,” Orgeron says. “People would drive by and yell ‘You quit.’ It was the worst time of my life.”

A former high school teammate — quarterback Bobby Hebert — persuaded Orgeron to join him at Northwestern (La.) State, where they both had successful college careers.

For years afterward, whenever Orgeron drove across the Horace Wilkinson Bridge and saw the LSU campus along the river, he told himself: I’m gonna make it back there someday.

Maybe not quite as sad as having to put down Mike. But, well, it's a similar situation.