By Mike Triplett
The Times-Picayune Staff writer
BATON ROUGE — With its first national championship in half a century, LSU officially re-established itself as a football powerhouse.
But the state’s largest university is much more than a football school:
- The men’s and women’s basketball teams are well on their way back to the NCAA Tournament, where the Lady Tigers reached the Elite Eight last season.
- The defending national champion women’s track and field team is ranked No. 1 in the nation. The baseball team and the men’s track and field team are both ranked No. 2. Gymnastics is ranked 13th, softball 14th, men’s tennis 16th.
- Facilities are sprouting around campus, from football to women’s basketball to golf. More money and more facilities will come from the school’s new priority- seating contributions in Tiger Stadium.
- The 3-year-old academic center for student-athletes is the “envy of everybody in the nation,” according to third-year athletic director Skip Bertman.
And academic performance among student-athletes is on the rise.
Roger Grooters, who runs the academic center, said this past semester was the “best I’ve ever had” in 17 years at LSU, Southern California, Michigan State, Florida State and Nebraska.
Quite simply, LSU believes it is on the cusp of its greatest athletic success in the school’s proud history.
“We’ve always done well. But I want more,” said Bertman, who won five national championships in the 1990s as coach of the LSU baseball team. “And I think the coaches are with me. I don’t think the coaches want to coast.”
University chancellor Mark Emmert shares that attitude.
Emmert hired football coach Nick Saban away from Michigan State four years ago for a then-controversial price tag of $1.2 million a year. This week, Saban’s salary is expected to rise above $2.5 million annually.
Emmert has embraced the idea that athletic success can add to a university’s overall success.
“It’s a priority in that, as I say in all my speeches, we want to pursue excellence in everything we do,” said Emmert, who previously worked at the University of Connecticut, Montana State University and the University of Colorado before being hired at LSU in 1999. “Obviously, athletics is not as important as our academic goals. But I’ve had a clear understanding of how the two could go together hand and glove.
“And the notion that you can’t simultaneously improve academics and athletics is just wrong.”
Best of the best
LSU ranked sixth two years ago in a Sports Illustrated list of “America’s Best Sports Colleges.” And that was before the Tigers won their first football championship since 1958.
But football isn’t everything, which is why Stanford was ranked No. 2 on the Sports Illustrated list.
Stanford, an esteemed academic and athletic school in California, has never had great football success. But the Cardinal has been ranked No. 1 nine years running in the NACDA Directors’ Cup standings, thanks to top-10 finishes in more than a dozen sports.
The National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics ranks every Division I school, based on its top-10 men’s finishes and top-10 women’s finishes. Stanford is helped by having more than 30 Division I sports, and LSU has 20.
The Tigers have reached as high as No. 10 on the NACDA list four times in the last seven years. But last year, LSU dipped to No. 23.
“I’d like to be the best SEC team, where all things are equal,” Bertman said. “I expect to win in all the sports. And my philosophy is very simple: As long as you’re competing and representing purple and gold, and as long as you’re representing your folks and yourself, you might as well win. And if you can’t, you should at least do well.”
Gen. Ron Richard, director of the Tiger Athletic Foundation, said he believes LSU can have the best athletic department in the nation. While it might seem many schools would share that goal, Bertman said that’s not true.
“Most schools don’t have that philosophy, including schools in the SEC,” Bertman said. “A lot of schools don’t compete much after football, basketball, baseball, unless it’s ice hockey or wrestling or something unique to that area.
“And there’s a reason for that. Because if they’re real good, they’re (the coaches) going to ask for more. And you have to pay ’em more. See, I’m not afraid of that. I’m willing to pay for excellence.
“I’m willing to find the money and raise the money for golf, tennis, swimming, track and field, volleyball, soccer, baseball, softball, all of ’em. To me, they’re all important.”
LSU track and field coach Pat Henry, who has coached both the men and the women for 16 years, commended Emmert and Bertman, as well as previous LSU athletic director Joe Dean and previous chancellor Bud Davis.
Henry said the key ingredient for athletic success is the attitude.
“I think it does take great vision for a department to flourish,” said Henry, who has led the Tigers to 23 NCAA titles. “I don’t think it’s always money and winning. The most successful school is Stanford, hands down. They don’t win national championships in football. They don’t have the kind of revenue that we’re talking about being generated from football.
“They have great involvement in their university, and they think athletics is a pivotal area, important to the entire institution. So they support that. Their alums give back to the university. That part of their education was very important to them.”
The ‘engine’
LSU’s reputation as an academic institution is on the rise, as well. Recently, Newsweek listed LSU as one of the nation’s 12 “hot schools.”
The football championship didn’t hurt, either. Along with it came hundreds of hours of free advertising.
SEC commissioner Mike Slive said national TV spots, as well as news articles in The New York Times and in The Times-Picayune, among others, glorified the university as a whole.
“I think the chancellor did an excellent job of taking that opportunity and opening a window using athletics,” Slive said. “It places in proper perspective the opportunity to be excellent, not only in a particular department but as a whole.
“One of the things we have as a goal, long term, is elevating the reputations of our institutions nationwide as institutions of higher learning, not just athletics.”
Saban has been one of the most vocal proponents of improving LSU’s academics among student-athletes.
Saban urged LSU to build the academic center because he had seen it work wonders at Michigan State. Saban also suggested Grooters to run the program.
This past fall, only five scholarship players on the football team had a grade-point average below 2.0. Only 29 student-athletes in all sports, out of 433 total, had a GPA below 2.0.
Forty-seven percent of LSU’s student-athletes had a GPA of 3.0 or higher.
“And the thing that’s so good about it was that it was in a year when there was so much emphasis put on sports and so much attention drawn to the sports side of things,” Grooters said.
LSU’s football success has paid several dividends, from merchandise sales to alumni donations to recruiting.
The football team had a signing class this month that was rated No. 2 in the nation, after landing the top-rated class last year. Other sports also felt the surge.
Softball coach Yvette Girouard said one of her recruits from New Jersey was teased for deciding to leave the Northeast. Then after LSU won the football title, everyone back home demanded hats and T-shirts.
Women’s basketball coach Sue Gunter said Saban has been LSU’s “salvation in many, many ways,” from his ethics, his discipline, his emphasis on graduation rates to his sheer ability to win.
“Football is the engine that drives the train,” said Judy Southard, LSU’s senior women’s administrator. “Every coach will tell you it has had nothing but the most positive effects on their programs. It’s a trickle-down effect. LSU was all over TV for a month-and-a-half.
“That enhanced the recruiting all the way down to the last women’s tennis player we signed to the top men’s basketball player we signed.”
A ‘coach’s athletic director’
Everyone from Southard to Emmert to Slive to various coaches saved their highest praise for Bertman.
Bertman, a 65-year-old who turned LSU’s non-descript baseball program into the nation’s best in the 1980s and ’90s, encourages the same from all of his coaches.
He is a master motivator, a terrific speaker and fund-raiser.
“I think he’s an athletic director that is a ‘coach’s athletic director,’ ” said Gunter, who is in her 22nd season at LSU. “He’s been there before. He’s had to raise the money. He’s had his group of assistant coaches.
“He has been a huge, huge asset to helping us, giving us ideas on promotions, on fund-raising, on doing all the things that we have to do. I cannot think of one fund-raiser that I had to go to or one speech that I had to give that if I asked him to go with me, that he wasn’t there.”
But, Gunter said, Bertman also has high expectations of his coaches.
“He wants to win, and he’ll tell you he wants to win,” Gunter said. “He doesn’t want to be mediocre. He doesn’t want to be middle-of-the-road. And I like that. I think all of us like that.”
Men’s basketball coach John Brady commended Bertman’s “courage and vision” in taking over operation of the Pete Maravich Assembly Center from the university. Brady sees it as making an investment in the arena.
When Bertman took the job, nobody knew he would be in it for the long haul. He was seen as a “compromise candidate” between Baton Rouge district attorney Doug Moreau and then-Oregon State athletic director Mitch Barnhart. Bertman was someone that everybody liked.
He turned out to be a perfect fit.
“His tenure has been critical to our success,” Emmert said. “He has, I think, turned into a superb athletic administrator. He does a great job in every aspect of the role. He’s changed the entire environment inside the athletic building.”
Bertman, in turn, credits his mostly new staff, which includes Southard and senior associate athletic director Dan Radakovich, among others. In three years, Bertman has not fired or hired any head coaches.
He thinks he will stick around, too.
“When I originally got the call, I thought I’d go three, four, five years and straighten out a few things that I thought needed straightening out. But quite honestly, I enjoy it,” said Bertman, who had planned to work part-time in the athletic department and spend his weekends as a traveling speaker. “I must say that I’m just so excited about LSU. In a sense, this is a new career. I’d like to do this for a while.”