Northwestern fired Pat Fitzgerald and needs a new long-term head coach immediately with the college football season creeping closer every day. Whoever assumes the reins will have a tall task as the Wildcats went winless in America last season and a situation like this is more likely to fracture a locker room than to galvanize it. All the requisite candidate speculation has been done to capture SEO without a single person floating the idea that former LSU coach Ed Orgeron could ever, under any circumstances really, end up in Evanston.
Then a few hours ago InsideNU's Bradley Locker dropped an eyebrow-raising report that the charismatic and potentially problematic Orgeron “would have interest” in filling the Northwestern vacancy if asked. The source who provided this information also revealed that, somewhat crucially, the school had not contacted Orgeron to discuss the idea.
To state the obvious: such a pairing does not seem like a culture fit. It's hard to think of two more diametrically opposed vibes than LSU and Northwestern. Northwestern State, for what it's worth, is where Orgeron played defensive line from 1980-1983 after transferring out of Baton Rogue. They currently have a coach in Brad Laird who led the Demons to their first winning season in the Southland Conference since 2010.
Many people pointed out that it would make way more sense for Orgeron to be intrigued by the possibility of coaching at his alma mater and the circumstance in which he left LSU might require some sort of reclamation project on a lower level.
In short, it was very confusing. Then again life is weird and surprising things happen all the time so you could forgive someone for shrugging their shoulders and saying that's really odd but okay and moving onto the next thing.
Less than the length of a college football game after that published — even the quick-moving puntfests common in the Big Ten West — The Athletic's Bruce Feldman called up Orgeron, who said there was no truth to the initial report.
Locker shared this news that refutes the original report. So that would seem to be the end of it. Only Coach O holds the answer key to the question if he is or isn't interested in grinding it out north of Chicago.
Truly a wild, perplexing few hours. We had to live in a world were Ed Orgeron's camp was playing footsie with Northwestern. We had to eat dinner and put our children to bed with that knowledge rattling around.
If you're dying of curiosity wondering just what exactly happened here, you're definitely not alone. Scoops out of nowhere are routinely followed by that thing coming into reality shortly later. Dunking on or diminishing anyone's reporting isn't something we really want to do. At the same time, it'd be great to get some more information on how all this went down at some point. A rather significant number of outlets aggregated the InsideNU story and who knows how many are going to update. Who knows how many sports fans are going to miss this update and dream about Orgeron in purple?
To be clear, we certainly don't have or purport to have all the facts. It's just that the idea of a Northwestern/Northwestern State mixup at some point along the line is objectively funny. So funny that we kind of want it to be true. Who knows, though?
This article was originally published on thebiglead as Ed Orgeron Refutes Baffling Northwestern Report, It's Possible Something Hilarious Just Happened.
