I meant to post this last week after hearing about it on a podcast interview from Bill King's show. Bill has a weekly interview with former NFL and college scout/assistant Chris Landry. Landry consults for lots of teams on personnel and has ties to LSU having started out there. Apparently he was working on the Saban's defensive staff at Bill Bilichick's Cleveland Browns team in the mid 90's.
Around that time Curley Hallman was on the tail end of the worst winning percentage for any non-interim LSU head coach in history. They were looking for a change in the Bayou and gave Curley a quit or be fired order but let him finish out the season. Landry was working for Saban in the NFL but was still in close contact with LSU and was promoting Nick for the HC job in Baton Rouge. Saban had made an unsuccessful play for the Ohio State job, so Landry started selling him on LSU. Nick did a bit of personal research and found that Louisiana produced an extraordinary number of eventual NFL players regardless of where they went to college.
Forgive me for going on a bit of a tangent here, but Saban of course didn't get the LSU job until 6 years later after building up a good HC rep at Michigan State. When Saban interviewed for the job then he apparently had a yellow legal pad of demands including a new student-athlete dorm building, new building for academic tutoring and a new football operations building (just listened to Chris' interview with Jordan Rodgers and he mentioned that stadium improvements are a secondary need compared to these types of improvements at Vandy). In 2000 LSU AD, Joe Dean, was told by Jimmie Sexton that they could get Nick for between $800K and $1.2M. Dean told his Chancelor Mark Emmert "let me talk him down, I think I can get him for $950K!" Chancelor Emmert responded "Joe, we're trying to make a commitment to football here. Just give him the $1.2M." (I dream of this type of convo happening between VCDW and Zeppos) Saban was given $1.2M which was the highest a college coach had ever been paid at the time and a turned a 3-8 Dinardo team into an 8-3 Peach Bowl team the next year (and eventual national champ 3 seasons after that) .
Back to DiNardo. So at the end of the 1994 season LSU is hot to hire TCU's Pat Sullivan to take over. They had the deal nearly inked but had a big disagreement over the matter of a $750K buyout. Sullivan felt LSU should pay it while LSU thought Sullivan should eat the buyout. LSU had a press conference announced and literally cancelled everything when an LSU board member, Charlie Cusimano, scoffed at the buyout and said that he kind of knows Gerry DiNardo and could get him. DiNardo agreed within 48 hours of LSU cancelling the press conference to announce the hiring of Sullivan. So it came as a complete surprise to Gerry which explains what he was thinking about rather than prepping for the Vandy/UT game that Saturday (0-65).
https://soundcloud.com/nashsportsradio/chris-landry-4-5-18
Around that time Curley Hallman was on the tail end of the worst winning percentage for any non-interim LSU head coach in history. They were looking for a change in the Bayou and gave Curley a quit or be fired order but let him finish out the season. Landry was working for Saban in the NFL but was still in close contact with LSU and was promoting Nick for the HC job in Baton Rouge. Saban had made an unsuccessful play for the Ohio State job, so Landry started selling him on LSU. Nick did a bit of personal research and found that Louisiana produced an extraordinary number of eventual NFL players regardless of where they went to college.
Forgive me for going on a bit of a tangent here, but Saban of course didn't get the LSU job until 6 years later after building up a good HC rep at Michigan State. When Saban interviewed for the job then he apparently had a yellow legal pad of demands including a new student-athlete dorm building, new building for academic tutoring and a new football operations building (just listened to Chris' interview with Jordan Rodgers and he mentioned that stadium improvements are a secondary need compared to these types of improvements at Vandy). In 2000 LSU AD, Joe Dean, was told by Jimmie Sexton that they could get Nick for between $800K and $1.2M. Dean told his Chancelor Mark Emmert "let me talk him down, I think I can get him for $950K!" Chancelor Emmert responded "Joe, we're trying to make a commitment to football here. Just give him the $1.2M." (I dream of this type of convo happening between VCDW and Zeppos) Saban was given $1.2M which was the highest a college coach had ever been paid at the time and a turned a 3-8 Dinardo team into an 8-3 Peach Bowl team the next year (and eventual national champ 3 seasons after that) .
Back to DiNardo. So at the end of the 1994 season LSU is hot to hire TCU's Pat Sullivan to take over. They had the deal nearly inked but had a big disagreement over the matter of a $750K buyout. Sullivan felt LSU should pay it while LSU thought Sullivan should eat the buyout. LSU had a press conference announced and literally cancelled everything when an LSU board member, Charlie Cusimano, scoffed at the buyout and said that he kind of knows Gerry DiNardo and could get him. DiNardo agreed within 48 hours of LSU cancelling the press conference to announce the hiring of Sullivan. So it came as a complete surprise to Gerry which explains what he was thinking about rather than prepping for the Vandy/UT game that Saturday (0-65).
https://soundcloud.com/nashsportsradio/chris-landry-4-5-18
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