LSU interim AD Verge Ausberry says the school’s athletic department ‘is not broken’

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — As LSU interim athletic director Verge Ausberry sat between two members of the LSU Board of Supervisors who’d been appointed by Gov. Jeff Landry, he sought to assure Tigers fans that the abrupt departure of previous athletic director Scott Woodward was not a sign of dysfunction.

“We have championship coaches here. This place is not broken,” Ausberry said Friday in a meeting room inside 102,000-seat Tiger Stadium. “The athletic department is not broken. We win.”

A night earlier, one of those championship coaches, women’s basketball coach Kim Mulkey, declined to attend a press conference after an exhibition game because she was “heartbroken” over Woodward’s departure, said assistant coach Bob Starkey, who spoke in her place.

Woodward stepped down on Thursday night, four days after football coach Brian Kelly had been fired, one day after Landry asserted that Woodward would not select Kelly’s successor, and four years before Woodward’s contract as athletic director — worth close to $2 million annually — was due to expire.

“What an exciting day here today at LSU,” John Carmouche, who chairs the board’s athletics committee, said Friday morning as he formally introduced Ausberry as interim AD. “It is important to me and many others that LSU and our state restore balance so we can reclaim the future we built in athletics as an institution and as a state.”

Board chairman Scott Ballard portrayed Woodward’s departure not so much as performance-based, but rather as “a mutual agreement after conversations” between Woodward and the LSU board.

“Nothing’s off the table of why Scott and LSU had a mutual agreement that after those conversations that they mutually agreed that it was a good idea,” Ballard said. “Scott is a great human being. Scott was a good, Baton Rouge, LSU Tiger. It had nothing to do with any of that. … They mutually agreed that it was time. It wasn’t an LSU thing. It wasn’t a Scott thing.”

Woodward, who grew up in Baton Rouge and attended LSU, returned to his alma mater as athletic director in April 2019 after serving in the same post at Texas A&M, and before that, at Washington. The NCAA national championships LSU won during Woodward’s tenure included baseball (twice), football, women’s basketball, men’s outdoor track and field, and gymnastics.

The board members said a financial settlement with Woodward had yet to be worked out, but that not public money would be used to pay it.

“It does not come from state dollars that are allocated towards other things like education,” Ballard said. “It’ll come from self-generated athletic funds and or private donations.” Carmouche said Ausberry “is the ideal person to lead this department through this change, and I want to be very clear he has full authority to do so. That includes leading the search for our next head coach and hiring our next head coach.”

Ausberry said the search committee for the next football coach would be comprised of himself, Carmouche, Ballard, former player and booster Ben Bordelon, EJ Kuiper (the CEO of a Baton Rouge-based, regional health system) and a person yet to be named.

“My phone is still ringing,” Ausberry said. “A lot of people kind of still want to come to LSU. … It is the best job in the country at this time.”

“We are not going to let this (football) program fail,” Ausberry said. “LSU has to be in the (College Football Playoff) every year in football. … This big building here has to be successful if we’re going to be successful as an athletic department. It’s the measuring stick that we have here.”

Kelly was fired Sunday, a day after LSU lost 49-25 to Texas A&M for the Tigers’ third loss in four games. The coach was in the fourth year of a 10-year, $100 million contract, the buyout for which at this time is about $53 million.

On Wednesday, Landry said the next contract for a football coach should feature more performance-based incentives and fewer long-term guarantees, which can lead to large buyouts if a coach is fired.

But Ausberry said the board’s instructions to him are to “get the best football coach there is and don’t worry about that at all.”

Ausberry, a former LSU football player who has worked in LSU athletics administration since 1991, says he walked on the field during the third quarter of that game, looked around Tiger Stadium and was struck by the sight of empty seats and empty suites.

Former Ohio State coach “Woody Hayes always said the worst word in the dictionary is apathy,” Ausberry said. “This program cannot have apathy.”

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