LSU HC Ed Orgeron Was Almost Kicked Off His College Team for Trashing Dorm Room

LSU football head coach Ed Orgeron enters Monday with a chance to lead the No. 1 Tigers to a College Football Playoff national title and a perfect 15-0 record if they beat Clemson.

However, Orgeron may have never gone down the path of potentially becoming a championship-winning coach had he been kicked off the Northwestern State football team in 1982 for trashing a dorm room.

Per Brent Schrotenboer of USA Today, former Northwestern State head coach Sam Goodwin considered removing Orgeron from his roster for the act.

Goodwin told Schrotenboer that the housing director for the school "took me into this one room, and every piece of furniture in there was broke."

"Just a total disaster," he said. "He told me two of my players did all that, and it wasn't the first time they had done it. One of them was Bebe Orgeron (Ed Orgeron's nickname), and the other Bryan Arceneaux, both of them from South Lafourche."

However, Orgeron made a good impression on Goodwin during a discussion about the room's state, which convinced the program leader to keep the man later known as "Coach O" on board.

Goodwin told Schrotenboer:

"I was expecting to see a couple of alligator chasers, filthy and uncouth and undisciplined and the whole bit. I was totally shocked. They dressed really nice, very polite, clean-cut, and it messed with my mind a little bit -- what I was seeing in one place (at the dorm) and what I was seeing in another. We had a good visit, and I was going to give them one more chance."

Arceneaux disputes that they broke furniture but wonders what path Orgeron would have gone down had he been removed from the team.

"I hate to even think about what would have happened with [Orgeron]," Arceneaux said. "That was his second chance. I don't even want to talk about that."

Schrotenboer pondered the possibilities:

"Orgeron, a defensive lineman might have left college again. He might not have graduated from Northwestern State, as he did in 1984. He might not have started his coaching career, as he did on the Demons staff that same year. He instead might have moved on to his other known occupations, digging ditches and shoveling shrimp in South Louisiana, instead of ending up as the gruff-talking, brawny father figure of the No. 1 team in the nation."

Orgeron has done a sensational job with the LSU program, going 39-9 overall. The Tigers finished last year ranked sixth in the Associated Press poll after a Fiesta Bowl win over Central Florida. They've built on that success this season thanks to a Heisman Trophy-winning campaign from quarterback Joe Burrow and the efforts of many others.

We'll never know if LSU would have been in this situation if not for a decision made in 1982 by Northwestern State's football coach, but Tigers fans have to be thrilled that Orgeron is leading their program today.