Amid a metastasizing Title IX scandal at LSU, football coach Ed Orgeron was named as a defendant in a major sex discrimination lawsuit against the university, and he was accused of brushing off a report that his star player raped a recruit's girlfriend.

Orgeron denied that, along with allegations that he tried to persuade a 74-year-old grandmother to forgive the same football star — Derrius Guice — after Guice sexually harassed her in public while she was working at the Superdome.

But the administrators who oversee LSU athletics have made their rationale for firing Orgeron crystal clear, and say it had nothing to do with the treatment of women on the state’s flagship campus: The coach was simply losing too many games.

As athletic director Scott Woodward put it in a recent news conference announcing that Orgeron would be out at the end of the season, the sacking was over “on-the-field results.” Athletic department spokesperson Cody Worsham reiterated for this story that the decision “was based on our on-field results and an evaluation of future immediate success.”

Woodward also shot down a question about Orgeron losing the trust of Black players in summer of 2020 as he voiced his support for President Donald Trump around the time that they organized a police brutality and racial inequality protest.

“It had nothing to do with this decision,” Woodward said. “It was wins and losses on the field and where this program was going.”

The view from LSU brass that Orgeron’s only problems were in the win-loss column suggests that not much has changed in how top university officials evaluate success and failure inside the athletic department, critics say. After nearly a year of scandal and revelations about sexual assault, domestic violence and other types of sexual misconduct — largely involving LSU football players under Orgeron’s oversight — LSU officials took pains to make it clear that if he had been winning more, Orgeron would be striding the sidelines as long as the magic lasted.

The messaging has been a disappointment for some with a close eye on LSU.

“Wins and losses on the field are clearly a metric that any athletic director would use,” said state Rep. Aimee Freeman, a New Orleans Democrat who along with her colleagues in the legislative women’s caucus has spent months calling for more accountability from LSU.

“But the tone of how you run your team — and the fact that rapes and sexual assaults were covered up — that should go into consideration as well,” Freeman said. “I really do question why you wouldn’t consider that.”

Other members of the women’s caucus had questions as well. Senate Select Committee on Women and Children Chairwoman Regina Barrow said she wondered if the hearings her panel held on Title IX gave LSU a more holistic view on Orgeron, including raising unanswered questions about how the program was run. And State Rep. C. Denise Marcelle said Orgeron’s track record on Title IX “certainly should have been considered from the onset” in evaluating his performance.

LSU’s dismissal of Orgeron continues a tradition of LSU protecting highflying coaches from scandal while they’re winning, only to dump them after their teams start losing. LSU held onto former football coach Les Miles for years after officials found a student’s sexual harassment allegation against him credible enough that Miles was ordered to stay away from female students, and to stop texting them and hiring them as babysitters. Miles denied the allegations.

It’s also been more than two years since LSU men's basketball coach Will Wade was caught on an FBI wiretap discussing a “strong-ass offer” to a recruit, but he has continued to coach winning teams at LSU.

LSU, meanwhile, ousted former athletic director Joe Alleva, after his attempts to clamp down on both Wade and Miles over their behavior off the field and off the court. Alleva argued that Miles should be fired for cause over the sexual harassment investigation, and his attempts to stop Wade from coaching during the FBI probe resulted in students and fans heckling Alleva instead.

The size of Orgeron’s buyout has also sent a message, and infuriated many observers who have long questioned LSU’s priorities. His $17 million parachute will come from the athletics side of campus, not state funds. But LSU’s academic side of campus weathered years of punishing budget cuts, cuts that former LSU President F. King Alexander blamed for the inability to fund a robust Title IX office that would investigate sexual assault on campus. Once upon a time, LSU sports programs donated some of their profits back to the university, but Woodward ended that in 2019.

The day after LSU announced Orgeron’s firing, around 100 students marched through campus to protest the latest Title IX case to stir outrage on campus — one in which six women accused a graduate student from France of a range of sexual misconduct at LSU, including rape. Attorney Mimi Methvin, who has sued LSU over its fumbling of the matter, explicitly contrasted the blank check for football with the empty coffers for Title IX.

“In 2016, the Title IX coordinator asked for $329,000 to hire more investigators for the Title IX office and to train them,” Methvin said. “This comes out to $9.67 per LSU student. And what do we have here? $17 million going to Coach O to go away.”

LSU expects to spend the most it’s ever spent on Title IX this year. But the $2.5 million budgeted for the Office of Civil Rights and Title IX for the fiscal year that started in July is still less than half the amount LSU is expected to pay Orgeron over the same period of time. The first four payments of his buyout over the next fiscal year total $7.3 million.

Firing ‘for cause’ a risky proposition

LSU could have avoided paying a huge sum to Orgeron if the university had fired him “for cause.”

But several lawyers who reviewed Orgeron’s contracts for The Advocate | The Times-Picayune, including some with connections to LSU and some outsiders, said that firing Orgeron “for cause” likely presented too many pitfalls.

For instance, had LSU cited the Title IX allegations lodged against Orgeron as a cause for firing him, attorneys said it would weaken LSU’s position in Title IX lawsuits targeting the university. Instead, Orgeron’s buyout deal requires him to participate in the defense of the university in Title IX suits.

In one of those lawsuits, former LSU student Ashlyn Robertson alleges that  Guice raped her in 2016, when she was passed out on her bed at a party. When she later told her boyfriend — an LSU football recruit — about it, he complained to Orgeron, according to the suit, which does not name her boyfriend.

"Orgeron responded by telling Robertson’s boyfriend to not be upset because 'everybody’s girlfriend sleeps with other people,’” the lawsuit states.

Orgeron has previously said that’s not an accurate account of his conversation with his player, and that they instead discussed the player’s potential transfer and relationship challenges. “Any insinuation that I had knowledge of his girlfriend and Derrius Guice is completely false,” he said.

But that allegation was hardly the only one. A second former student also accused Guice of raping her in 2016, while a third former student filed a police report in 2016 alleging that he shared a partially nude photo of her without her permission. And in late 2017, the Superdome security guard said Guice sexually harassed her and that Orgeron intervened on the player’s behalf. 

Guice was never arrested for any of the incidents, and his attorney previously denied that he committed any wrongdoing at LSU.

“Whether he knew or not, he was the head of the organization,” Freeman, the state legislator, said of Orgeron. “If he didn’t know, shame on him. And if he did know, that’s criminal.”

State Rep. Mandie Landry, a New Orleans Democrat, also said she hopes that LSU will soon be “more transparent about the involvement and knowledge of staff in covering up assaults.”

But it behooves LSU for Orgeron to leave quietly.

“A lot of it probably comes down to the fact that it’s in the university’s best interest for coach Orgeron to not be unhappy with LSU,” said Joshua Lens, a sports management and recreation professor at the University of Arkansas and a former college athletics administrator.

That being said, Lens pointed to clauses in Orgeron’s contract that require compliance with the university’s mission and order the coach not to bring the organization into “public disrepute.” LSU could have come up with a “somewhat viable defense” to fire him for cause based on those provisions, Lens said.

But a recent episode at the University of Tennessee may illustrate why LSU wanted to avoid such a gambit. Tennessee fired football coach Jeremy Pruitt for cause earlier this year, alleging his staff committed serious NCAA violations. But as Pruitt has pushed Tennessee to pay his $12.6 million buyout, his lawyer has threatened a lawsuit that he said would “cripple UT’s athletic programs for years” with widespread allegations of wrongdoings.

LSU is willingly paying Orgeron roughly 50% more than Tennessee has so far avoided paying Pruitt — and about 50% more than the Tigers listed as their buyout for Miles to go away.

Orgeron also got better terms. Miles’ buyout of around $12 million also required him to seek other employment while he was receiving monthly payments from LSU. It said that if Miles were to get a new job, his new salary would offset LSU’s payments to him. Miles and LSU later reached a $1.5 million settlement, which freed him up to become football coach at the University of Kansas in 2018.

Orgeron’s buyout has no such provision. Regardless of how much he earns in the future, LSU will be responsible for paying him an amount that is roughly equivalent to the combined instructional budgets for LSU’s mechanical engineering, economics and English departments.

“That money that’s coming from private funds could be going elsewhere,” said David Ridpath, a sports management professor at Ohio University. Ridpath is heavily involved with The Drake Group, which pushes for reform in college athletics, including congressional caps on college athletics spending.

“I just don’t know why the buyout has to be so astronomical,” Ridpath added. “At a school like LSU, that is struggling mightily academically, with infrastructure, it’s just a really bad look.”

Looking for ‘a winning team and to hold everybody accountable’

While LSU seeks Orgeron’s successor, some say they hope LSU does not miss a chance to make a strong statement about values that go beyond winning football games. Asked whether Title IX would play a role in the search for his replacement, Worsham, the athletic department spokesman, responded that “the next LSU football head coach will share our vision for excellence and our commitments on the football field, on campus and in the community.”

Some want more.

“We’ve seen situations where the coach is a role model for his team beyond the playing field,” said state Sen. Pro Tem Beth Mizell, a Franklinton Republican who has also skewered LSU over its mishandling of Title IX cases.

“You're shaping these young men to be mature, adult men,” she said. “And it’s a missed opportunity if you don’t see it that way. There have been too many situations off the field that could have been handled differently. It’s a whole package. It’s more than the x’s and o’s that we care about.”

Marcelle, a Democratic lawmaker from Baton Rouge, said she wants LSU to hire someone who will win games, but also who is sensitive to Title IX and who will hold those around him accountable.

“They’re not going to go get somebody who’s strong on Title IX and can’t coach,” she said. “We would throw him out next week. You have to look at that person’s entire background, to have a winning team and to hold everybody accountable.”

Long before Orgeron’s firing became official, Baton Rouge has been awash in rumors about who might replace him. There’s little agreement on the shortlist, but several of those widely considered to be in contention for the job bring their own baggage.

Jimbo Fisher, for example, was coach at Florida State when a rape scandal erupted in 2012 involving quarterback Jameis Winston, now the New Orleans Saints’ signal-caller. Fisher defended Winston, who was never charged with a crime and who later reached a settlement in a 2015 lawsuit with the woman who accused him of rape. Woodward later hired Fisher as coach at Texas A&M, where the NCAA announced last summer that Fisher had violated recruiting rules.

James Franklin was Vanderbilt’s coach when four football players in 2013 were accused of gang-raping a student and videotaping it. All four were later convicted. Franklin was called to testify in 2014 over how he reacted to the incident, because he had previously told players that he’d seen video of the assault.

In a court hearing, Franklin, now coach at Penn State, said he in fact had not seen the video, but that he spoke to his players as if he had “because I was angry and upset and didn't want to water down the message to them.”

Ole Miss football coach Lane Kiffin left Tennessee in 2010 to become coach at USC, where he was forced out and replaced by Orgeron. An NCAA report after he left Tennessee found that Kiffin had “failed to promote an atmosphere of compliance of NCAA rules.” And while at Florida Atlantic University in 2017, he welcomed a quarterback who had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor battery charges after being caught on video hitting a woman in a bar.

And Urban Meyer left Ohio State after being briefly suspended during the 2018 football season amid reports that he knew one of his assistant coaches was beating his wife. The assistant coach, Zach Smith, was sentenced last year to serve 20 days in jail for violating a protective order. Meyer is now coach of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars.

“There’s so few coaches out there that haven’t been tainted by scandal,” Ridpath said.

Freeman said LSU's recent scandals have prompted closer attention on the search for Orgeron’s replacement — along with a brighter spotlight on LSU as a whole.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” she said. “And the sheriff is a bunch of women who are watching.”

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