BATON ROUGE ? Gov. Bobby Jindal is a huge LSU fan, but not even the Tigers' athletic department can escape his state hiring freeze instituted one day after he took office in January. LSU had to ask permission from Commissioner of Administration Angele Davis in recent weeks for exemptions to the freeze in order to hire a new athletic director and men's basketball coach, the searches for which are ongoing. "I'm so glad Les Miles didn't go to Michigan, or we would have had to ask permission to hire a new football coach," LSU associate athletic director Herb Vincent said, but he was only kidding. Seriously, though, a new football coach at LSU would have likely been very expensive. Miles' total package is $3.5 million, and the reason Jindal set forth the hiring freeze was to save about $25 million. "There are higher education jobs around the state that have not been filled for years, but institutions still get the money for those jobs even if they do not hire anyone," said Micheal DiResto, who is Davis' director of communications and strategic initiatives. "The governor's goal is to get a handle on government spending, including personnel," DiResto said. LSU officials never feared that it would not be given the OK on certain jobs, but the process is new ground. "It's the first time in the 24 years that I've been here that permission had to be asked to fill major jobs like athletic director or basketball coach," said Mark Ewing, LSU's associate athletic director for business who used to serve as LSU's overall budget director in the school's office of Budget and Planning. LSU also had to be granted an exemption by Davis to hire new assistant football coach Joe Robinson after defensive coordinator Bo Pelini left. LSU recently had to get an exemption from Davis to hire a new assistant strength and conditioning coach for football when Jimmy Brumbaugh left to become a defensive line coach at Louisiana Tech. "The process used by Commissioner Davis is no different for an LSU coach than for any other state government position, even if the LSU job is more high profile," DiResto said. "It's something that we used to not have to do, but we knew there wasn't going to be a problem because we were replacing people in existing jobs," Ewing said. "We weren't creating new jobs." The LSU athletic department, in the past though, has freely created or rearranged jobs. There was not a clear job opening in the athletic department when athletic director Skip Bertman hired Vincent in August of 2002. Vincent, a former sports information director at LSU for 12 years, returned to the athletic department as an associate athletic director after working for a Southeastern Conference sports television network in Birmingham that went out of business. When former LSU basketball coach John Brady and assistant coach Rickey Broussard parted ways after the 2003-04 season, Bertman created an assistant to the director job for Broussard, who held that vaguely defined post for a year. Then when Dan Canevari, an assistant to Bertman for from 1991-2001 with the LSU baseball team, left his job as Southeastern Louisiana's head baseball coach in 2005, he took Broussard's old job and remains in that position at LSU with his office next door to Bertman's. "Basically, I do anything that Skip needs me to do," said Canevari, who assists in fundraising and helped in the transition of new baseball coach Paul Mainieri last year. "We would probably have more difficulty now creating new positions or reshuffling them," Ewing said. On the other hand, when associate athletic director Dan Radakovich, who was Bertman's right hand man, left LSU to become Georgia Tech's athletic director in February of 2006, LSU did not hire anyone to replace him. Bertman simply revamped the duties of Vincent, Canevari, associate athletic director Verge Ausberry, who took over Radakovich's football scheduling duties, and others. The LSU basketball team, meanwhile, has been an employee short since Brady was fired on Feb. 7 and replaced on an interim basis by assistant coach Butch Pierre, who inherited a program that was 8-13 but has turned things around. Pierre may become more than a casual candidate for the job if he keeps winning. LSU is 5-4 under Pierre going into the Southeastern Conference Tournament Thursday in Atlanta. The Tigers had won a season-high four straight games before losing at SEC West champ Mississippi State on Saturday. "If the team keeps winning the way it has been under coach Pierre, perhaps the hiring freeze should share some of the credit," DiResto said jokingly. "And maybe the exemption request for a replacement should get some extra scrutiny." Link To Original Article
