Editor’s note: Longtime Baton Rouge sportswriter, author and television host Lee Feinswog takes his unique approach to sports to dig deeper into LSU Athletics. Look for these features online and in official athletics department publications throughout the 2014-15 season.
He had just come back from a recruiting trip and was driving out of the Lexington airport when his phone rang.
It was LSU football coach Les Miles, asking him about returning to Baton Rouge. And Bradley Dale Peveto cried.
“It was really an emotional call for me, because of my love and passion for coach Miles, LSU, this program, the state, the people, Baton Rouge,” Peveto said. “It’s just a special place to me.
“And when you leave a place you never really get a chance to go back. If you did a study you’d see that not a lot of folks get to back to a place they’ve left in this business.”
He paused.
“I pulled off the side of the road and bawled my eyes out.
“It kind of overwhelmed me, know what I’m saying? Just the thought of it. And it’s worked out.”
Peveto, then with Kentucky but now LSU’s special-teams coordinator and defensive assistant, couldn’t be happier. He’s back at a place where he coached from 2005-08, which includes the national championship in 2007, but left to become the head coach at Northwestern State.
His life and resume oozes football. Peveto is a coach’s son, a self-proclamed “field-house rat,” who’s worked at nine different colleges after he finished play at SMU.
This is where he wants to be and glad to be wanted by the man who hired him back.
“I knew I was going to get a great coach,” Miles said. “The guy’s a committed worker, a guy who gets along with the staff, and I just knew we would have success.”
The first time Peveto came to LSU, he was the defensive coordinator at Middle Tennessee. Miles hired him as special teams coordinator and linebackers coach. In his first three years, LSU went 34-6, capped in 2007 by routing Ohio State for the BCS title.
But in sports, nothing ever stays the same. The defensive coordinator from that team, Bo Pelini, left to become the head coach at Nebraska. Miles promoted two assistants, Peveto and Doug Mallory, to co-defensive coordinators.
It didn’t work. In 2008 LSU finished 8-5, 3-5 in the SEC.
The short story is Miles hired John Chavis to run the defense. Mallory left to become defensive coordinator at New Mexico.
And Peveto took the job as head coach of Northwestern State in Natchitoches, where he was defensive coordinator from 1996-98. It was his first and only head-coaching job.
“A lot of folks thought I was forced to leave. I was not forced to leave and never felt that way,” Peveto said. “It was just one of those years. Some years you have those years. It is what it is sometimes.”
But the chance to become a head coach was to good to turn down.
“When I walked out that door (at LSU) to take that job, I told coach Miles bye and then the last guy I talked to was coach John Chavis. We exchanged cell phone numbers and I told him if there was anything I could do to help him just let me know.”
Peveto inherited a program in Natchitoches that needed rebuilding and went 0-11 in 2009, before going 14-19 the next three seasons.
“Sometimes I think the good Lord puts us where he wants us and I felt a great calling to go to Northwestern State at the time,” Peveto said. “I thought my family and I and as a staff and team we really made the place better in so many ways.”
But college football being what it can be, Peveto was fired and quickly was hired at Kentucky by Mark Stoops, who was also a career defensive guy taking his first head-coaching job.
“I had a great year with him and enjoyed it,” Peveto said.
Just as he has nearly every place he’s been, because football was always a big part of it.
When he was in the fifth grade, Peveto moved to Orangefield, Texas, not far from Beaumont and Port Arthur. His father was the high school coach.
“Our house was literally next to the field house,” Peveto said. “I could look out the window and see the field house and the stadium.
“Then in college, I could see the stadium my first two years at SMU, so from the time I was a little bitty boy till I was 20 years old, I could look outside and see the stadium … Growing up some kids have tree houses or forts, we had a little field house. I’ve always loved it and knew I was going to be a coach before I was in double digits, in elementary school.”
He was a quarterback growing up but moved to safety and special teams at SMU, where was he team captain his senior year despite never being a starter.
“Here’s the deal: When I got to college, I thought I was pretty cool. I thought I was a pretty good football player. I learned in the first five minutes of the first practice that I was below average, that I was just a guy. And very quickly I came to the realization that the only way I was going to get on the field, or even the bus to the games, was to bust my tail on special teams.”
The framework was laid and then his coaching career began in earnest, starting at Trinity Valley Community College, to Stephen F. Austin, to Southern Miss, Arkansas, the first time at Northwestern State and then Houston before heading to Middle Tennessee, the last stop before LSU.
“I had gotten to know coach Miles through Bill Clay, who was my position coach at SMU,” Peveto said. Clay later was Miles’ defensive coordinator at Oklahoma State. And then in 2005 Miles needed a linebacker coach with special teams expertise.
All along the way, special teams were important, starting with his dad, then SMU coach Bobby Collins and now Miles. There’s a lot to it, from both sides of placekicks, punts and kickoffs.
For special teams to in fact be special, “You really have to enjoy doing it,” Peveto said. “It has to be in your blood a little bit.”
Peveto, too, is one of those high-energy loud guys at practice.
“Super energy and no voice,” Miles said with a smile. “His voice is lost.”
Most people recognize the kicking side of things, where LSU is strong on placekicks with Colby Delahoussaye and punting with Jamie Keehn. For that matter, Delahoussaye, 4-for-4, is the only SEC placekicker not to miss this season and Keehn is averaging 46.6 yards per punt, second in the league.
Leonard Fournette is fifth in kickoff returns at 23.9 yards a try, and LSU is sixth of 14 in kickoff coverage.
“There are so many pieces of little information that are must pieces to communicate to a team to make you have elite special teams,” Miles said. “He recognizes one through 24 and he knows what’s important and what’s not.”
Peveto, who actually spends more time with the defense, said everyone on staff is integrated with the special teams.
“This is why this is a dream place to coach special teams: First of all, the blessing you have in being the special-teams coach is you get to address the whole football team. Because the whole football team is involved in the special teams. Secondly, to be successful, you have to have a head coach who is totally a special-teams head coach. He’s involved in it from giving you the players along with the coordinators to your meeting time to practice time. There’s nobody more committed to special teams in the country than Les Miles in ever facet.
“And players at LSU buy into the importance of special teams and what it means to win football games.”
Accordingly, he has a notebook thicker than the non-football person can imagine devoted solely to special teams, not the least of which includes scouting reports. He emphasizes to the LSU’s players that special teams have only one play to be perfect and make a difference.
“Every coach on this staff is involved in special teams,” Peveto said, proudly adding that LSU’s players want to be a part of them, too, including starters.
“It’s something I love about players here,” he said. “Our guys believe in it. They’ve bought in.”
Sort of like Peveto being back in Baton Rouge with his wife Melissa and their children, 12-year-old Payton Marie and 9-year-old Jake.
“It’s a real blessing to be back at LSU and something I don’t take for granted,” he said. “I feel very, very privileged.”