by Jake Terry
LSU Sports Information
Jan. 7, 2008, is a date etched into the minds of LSU fans all across the globe. On that day the second-ranked Fighting Tigers will take on top-ranked Ohio State in the Allstate BCS National Championship game.
What many fans may not know, however, is that Jan. 7th is merely a consummation of months of hard work and preparation by the staff of various departments inside LSU.
While the entire athletics department has been gearing up for the game, four areas inside the department ? the ticket office, the football equipment staff, the football video staff and the business office ? have been tirelessly working to equip not only the team but also the fans with the maximum opportunity for success in New Orleans.
The Ticket Office
The one area inside the athletics department that deals most directly with the fans is probably the ticket office, and they have been working hard to make sure everyone who received tickets according to the priority point system was able to get them in a timely manner. But don’t think for one moment that the ticket office staff took their job lightly. In fact, they started preparing for postseason ticket requests months ago.
“We’ve been preparing for a bowl game since early October, knowing we were going to be bowl eligible,” said Brian Broussard, assistant athletic director for ticket operations. “We send out forms to all season ticket holders to allow them to request postseason tickets for the SEC Championship and bowl game as early as we can.”
The ticket office faced a hectic scramble to get the SEC Championship game tickets to the fans because of the quick turnaround after the Arkansas game, but the ticket office faced a different challenge when Dec. 2nd rolled around and LSU found itself playing in the national title game. For this game, Broussard and his staff had more time to process and deliver the tickets. However, the sensitivity of the ticket situation increased dramatically because LSU was playing in THE game of games.
Because the Tigers were in the title game, more than 60,000 people requested tickets for the game, while the ticket office was issued only 16,000 to give.
“We have to set aside tickets for our players’ families, coaches, the students and so on down the line,” Broussard said. “Then you have to go through the process of who gets what according to the priority point system. So you go down the list trying to squeeze everybody in a seat that you possibly can.”
Luckily for the ticket office they had more time to work with in deciding how to handle the situation. Now, only days away from the game, the ticket office’s job, after months of preparation and weeks of mailing the tickets out, is nearly complete. The last major task for Broussard and his crew is handling student tickets the afternoon of game day.
“The goal on game day is that we really are doing only a couple things ? students tickets, hopefully minimal will call and then player tickets,” Broussard said. “It’s a long day, but if we have done everything we were supposed to do prior to that, then it should be very quiet and relatively smooth.”
The Football Equipment Staff
LSU equipment manager Greg Stringfellow has been through the bowl routine before. In fact, he and his staff have been through it so many times that Stringfellow has a huge book that outlines all the equipment and every possible object the team could need at a bowl site.
“Since 2000 we have been going to bowls every year, so we have a system that we use,” Stringfellow said. “That is what this big book sitting on my desk is for. Every little thing that goes in to it is in that book.”
Like Broussard in the ticket office, Stringfellow and his equipment staff have been preparing for a bowl game for months, planning what items the players will wear and the travel logistics for every possible bowl the Tigers could wind up in. When they found out Dec. 2 that LSU was headed down the road to New Orleans to play for the title, Stringfellow could not have been happier.
“We’ve been to New Orleans a bunch of times, so we know how to operate in the city. We don’t really have to find our way around,” Stringfellow said. “We know the people at the facilities ? the Superdome, the hotel, and the Sugar Bowl staff ? because we have worked with them a few times now. That helps out as far as the preparations for a game like this goes.”
Even though the equipment staff was familiar with the site and what to expect, it still did not make packing for the championship any easier. Most fans don’t realize exactly how much the equipment staff packs up for the football team. When one steps back and looks at it, it is as if LSU is packing up a small city.
“We’ll take three trucks down to New Orleans,” Stringfellow said. “We’ll take our semi truck down to the dome, and that will have all our players’ equipment, coaches’ equipment and stuff for the game on it.
“One truck will be just for the hotel ? all the offices, meeting rooms, all the stuff the coaches need at the hotels, snacks, pallets of drinks, all the training room equipment because there will be a training room at the hotel and at the Superdome ? so stuff for all the treatment will be on there.”
The equipment managers even pack up LSU’s own weights to set up a weight room so the team can work out in the Crescent City during game week, but that’s not all.
“Our third truck is a little truck that we own that is dedicated to all the equipment on the field for practices because we practice in New Orleans four times,” Stringfellow said. “We need all our dummies, footballs, chains. Anything that we typically use for practice, we took down here with us in that little truck.”
According to Stringfellow it took two entire days of packing by his student equipment managers to finish filling the trucks with all the material and equipment that the team would use throughout the week in New Orleans and in the game. Of course, preparation and packing began long before that.
“It’s a month long process from the end of the SEC Championship Game up until we left for the game to get everything ready to go, and the good thing is we are only 70 miles away if we forgot something, which hopefully we didn’t do,” Stringfellow said.
And if they did forget something, Stringfellow can always check the big bowl book to figure out what is missing. After all, it mentions everything they could possibly need.
The Football Video Staff
Every evening when the coaches want to study the film of that day’s practice, they simply turn on their laptops and pull the video straight from the server housed in the football operations center and maintained by video coordinator Doug Aucoin and his staff. It’s that simple.
LSU’s video department is completely tapeless. Aucoin’s student workers film practice on hard drives instead of film, so when practice is over the hard drives are uploaded to the server. Cutups are made of each segment of practice ? offense, defense and special teams ? as well as different situational drills from practice like goal line and two-minute drill plays, and the cutups are placed in the network for the coaches to pull up on their laptop from anywhere in the football operations center.
But what happens for a bowl game when LSU is no longer inside its home base, the operations center? Easy. Aucoin and his staff bring the server and the network with them.
“When we got down to the bowl site we set up 11 meeting rooms with projectors, and we now travel our network, which means I went down on the 1st and networked all the meeting rooms that night and the next morning, pulling cat 5 cables through all the meeting rooms back to the video office in the hotel,” Aucoin said.
“When we unplugged the server and went down to New Orleans on the 2nd, we plugged it in at the hotel and stuck our laptops in the meeting rooms and had our whole network up and running.”
Just as Stringfellow and the equipment staff endeavored to make everything feel like home by bringing all the equipment the team could need, Aucoin and his video staff have tried to make watching film the same in New Orleans as it is at home.
“Consistency is basically what you want,” Aucoin said. “When you’re off site, you shouldn’t want for anything. It shouldn’t be a situation where a coach wishes he had something to teach his players. Everything is there that they could need. That’s what we try to do.”
With the video staff setting up the hotel to run the video network all during the week leading up to the game, the video operations function just like they do at home, so the LSU coaching staff and players can study Ohio State film as well as their own film from practice to prepare for the game.
The Business Office
When the video staff and equipment staff bring all of their equipment and set up for the bowl, it is the business office that coordinates where it is all going to go and how it is going to get down there. That job falls under Mark Ewing, LSU’s associate athletic director for business.
Ewing and his staff in the business office have been in charge of setting up the hotel arrangements not only for the players and coaches but also for the other members of the athletics department staff and their families.
“We also had to work on the hotel rooming list, getting everybody’s names and how many bedrooms they need if they have small children,” Ewing said. “You have to get the athletes on certain floors, so it takes a good while, until about mid-December to get the hotel list complete.”
When Ewing found out LSU would be playing for the BCS title he, Broussard, Stringfellow, Aucoin and others traveled to New Orleans for a site visit to prepare for the bowl setup.
“We move the whole football operations center down here ? the offices, the training room, the video room, the weight room ? all of it goes down here during the bowl week. So we had to make sure we had the space available in the hotel for all that,” Ewing said.
When all is said and done, Ewing and his staff have prepared and provided for around 400 different people ? players, coaches, the staff and their families.
“We have people in our office who work on certain aspects of the trip to make sure it’s a smooth transition down here, and that is what we have tried to do,” Ewing said.
The ticket office, business office, equipment staff and video staff represent four areas of the LSU athletics department that, as a whole, has worked nonstop to ensure the LSU football team and fans have an enjoyable stay in New Orleans.
Now, after all the weeks and months of preparation and effort put forth by the department, they can turn their focus on the date everyone has been waiting for ? Jan. 7th, when the Tigers collide with the Buckeyes for the national title.