Ed Orgeron and Lane Kiffin are reunited. Two college football coaches who were told to get the heck out of Oxford, Mississippi are back on the same staff together at LSU.
The national championship coach took a sizable pay cut to join the new head coach in Baton Rouge.
Lousiana State University paid Orgeron a lot of money not to be its college football coach over the last four years. He will earn just a small fraction of his previous buyout in the next eight months.
Ed Orgeron got paid $17 million not to coach.
There may not be any one figure in college football who is more synonymous with LSU than Orgeron. The 64-year-old was born and raised in the state. He played at Northwestern State. He is as Cajun as it gets.
Ed Orgeron joined the coaching staff at LSU for the first time in 2015. He was the defensive line coach under Les Miles. It did not take long for him to get promoted to interim head coach when Miles was fired in 2016. The Tigers went 6-2 during that stretch. They removed the interim tag not too long thereafter.
Orgeron went 9-4 in his first full season as the full-time head coach and won the Fiesta Bowl at 10-3 in year two. LSU went undefeated and won a national championship in 2019 with Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, Clyde Edwards-Helaire, Justin Jefferson, Grand Delpit, Patrick Queen and Derek Stingley Jr., among others. The roster was loaded. The Tigers did not lose.
Although Orgeron will forever be a legend in Louisiana because he won a national title, his next two years were a total disaster. LSU went a combined 11-11 in 2020 and 2021. It cut him loose in December and agreed to pay him a buyout of $17 million, which was more than enough to buy a few double cheeseburgers.
Needless to say, Orgeron did not have to seek employment over the last few years. He was able to complete a number of random side quests and travel all over the country to support his sons.
Lane Kiffin brought him back on a much lower salary at LSU.
There was a lot of chatter back in December about a potential reunion between Ed Orgeron and Lane Kiffin at LSU. They coached together at USC in the early 2000s and at Tennessee in 2009.
They are back together in Baton Rouge. Kiffin officially added Orgeron to his coaching staff at LSU on Wednesday night. He will serve as the “special assistant to recruiting and defense.”
According to the official term sheet, Louisiana State University will pay its former head coach $100,000 to be a special assistant. His contract will run through Jan. 31, 2027.
The final scheduled payment of the initial $16.9 million buyout was delivered in December at a cost of $426,000. He will get paid less than one fourth of that amount in monthly increments over the next 12 months. It is a pretty sizable pay cut but Orgeron does not need the money. His salary is perhaps more of a formality. Just enough to live. LOL.