"What was Joe Alleva thinking when he offered this contract?"- footballscoop.com

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As detailed by Ross Dellenger of The Advocate, Orgeron signed a 5-year contract worth $3.5 million per year that is heavy in incentives and security for the coach.

Should LSU fire Orgeron without cause after the 2017 season, the school would owe him $12 million. That number drops to $8.5 million in 2018, $6 million in ’19, $4.5 million in 2020 and $1 million in ’21.

While Herman had options, Orgeron had none. LSU competed against itself for his services. Serving as the head coach of his home state’s flagship program was Orgeron’s dream, and he weighed that option against….. being a defensive line coach again?

In Orgeron’s mind, the LSU head job against other options available to him at the time was a see-saw with field mouse on one end and an elephant on the other.

Here’s how deeply Orgeron considered the LSU job before taking it, as he described the 75-minute drive between his home in Mandeville and LSU’s Baton Rouge facility on the morning he would officially become the Tigers’ head coach: “I was going very fast, I was listening to some of my favorite music, I had the window down and I was hollering the whole way.”

This means that, on that same see-saw, LSU was the elephant at the negotiating table and Orgeron was the mouse. Joe Alleva and company had every available molecule of leverage.

And the end result was a contract where LSU assumes all of the risk in a scenario where, if the Orgeron Era doesn’t work out, the fault will lie entirely on the coach.

(To be abundantly clear, this isn’t about the hiring of Orgeron in the first place. A native son with his pulse on the heartbeat of football in Louisiana and a clear-eyed vision of where LSU needs to improve, we’ve gone on record liking this hire. This is merely deconstructing the contract LSU gave him.)

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All this to say: LSU spent a lot of time negotiating with Herman and very little doing the same with Orgeron. In fact, it appears they didn’t negotiate with Oregon at all. It looks like Alleva simply applied some white-out over Herman’s name to write Orgeron’s over it, chopped the salary down by a couple million and handed Coach O a contract to sign.

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