Bo Pelini unfiltered: LSU coach is ready for his second act

BATON ROUGE, La. — Bo Pelini is the last member of the LSU football team left in the school’s operations building. Across the street at Tiger Stadium, everyone else is feasting at the program’s annual pre-spring crawfish boil. That might appeal to some, but not Pelini, an Italian Midwesterner who much prefers red sauce over mud bugs. The crustaceans are too much work for too little payoff, he says.

Anyhow, he’s stuck in that office of his because an interview is running long, and he seems fine with it (whether that’s to avoid crawfish or not, who can say). The interview, in fact, is running so long that dusk approaches through the window over Pelini’s right shoulder, signaling the end of the final day before the reigning national champions begin spring practice. In an emblematic moment, the sun quite literally sets on the history-making 2019 Tigers, and it will rise hours later on a vastly different group (as it turns out, the coronavirus would shut down everything a week later). Three-fourths of LSU’s 2019 starters are gone, including 14 NFL draft picks; a handful of high-profile analysts left for full-time gigs; and two coordinators, Dave Aranda and Joe Brady, departed for big paydays.

There is a new but familiar face in these Cajun lands, and he’s sitting right here with a member of the media, a group that over the years, he feels, hasn’t treated him as kindly as he’d like—partially his own doing of course. From expletive-filled rants to explosive sideline exchanges, Pelini’s name for the vast majority of the college football public elicits an image of a snarling, red-faced man whose vocabulary is dependent on four-letter words. But there is no screaming during this interview. There is no yelling. There is no cussing. There is only Bo Pelini—misunderstood and mislabeled, he says—setting the record straight on the world’s perception of him and answering a couple of pointed questions: Why hasn’t a man with one of the best résumés of any fired college head coach gotten another big-time shot? And is he capable of doing it one day?

“I don’t think there’s any question I can,” Pelini says. “Everybody talks about wanting to win, but let’s face it, there are other things involved when these hires are made. I mean, there are always other agendas. I think sometimes people in college football are so concerned about the opening press conference that they forget: You better win football games.

“All the way back to when I was the defensive coordinator at Nebraska (in 2003), there was always an adjective in front of my name,” he continues. “The fiery Bo Pelini… the this Bo Pelini and that Bo Pelini. It got blown out of proportion. It was like every picture taken of me was me yelling at a ref. Most people never got to know what I stand for and who I really was.

“If somebody wants to win,” Pelini concludes, “they should call me.”

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Back during Pelini’s first stint as…