BATON ROUGE, La. — An unemployed Louisiana legend walks into a crawfish boil. He’s mowing down mudbugs, eating as many as he ever has. It’s a hot weekend and he’s with friends and family and the world is essentially his oyster this spring. He’s introduced to a very kind woman who is familiar with him. “Tommy,” she says. “I’m still upset about what they did to you.”
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Tommy Moffitt appreciates the gesture, of course. He knows it comes from a good place. But that is not the line of thinking this Monster Energy can of a man is operating his life with at this very time. That’s no good to him.
“Ma’am, that’s fine,” he says, “but you can get over it. I’ve gotten over it. The sun came up, and I’m gonna be just fine.”
It’s been more than five months since Moffitt was the first LSU staffer let go in the football program’s transition from Ed Orgeron to Brian Kelly as head coach, marking an extreme symbolic shift for LSU. This wasn’t just firing a head strength coach. This was firing an LSU institution.
Moffitt is one of the godfathers of modern strength and conditioning, the man Nick Saban hired in 2000 and who stood as the primary constant in LSU football’s golden age of three national championships from Saban to Les Miles to Orgeron. When you look into why LSU is among the top three programs in developing NFL Draft picks since 2000, don’t forget about the man who trained them. Moffitt was as famous in south Louisiana as any Tigers assistant coach, the fiery madman known for slamming folding chairs in the locker room before games and shouting on the sideline.
But this spring, he has no team to train. Kelly gutted the overwhelming majority of the LSU football infrastructure and started his rebuild with a new-look staff, including bringing his own guy, Jake Flint from Notre Dame, to run his strength department.
When coaching changes happen, we tend to focus on the headlines. We discuss the head coaches making career-defining shifts and the coordinators who join them. We don’t as often discuss the dismissals, the analysts, the personnel people and the strength coaches who aren’t part of the new plan or are viewed as part of the problem that needs to be fixed. Sometimes the new staff keeps those off-field members, at least for a while. Sometimes they clean house.
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But this isn’t a sob story. Moffitt won’t let it be. He’s the happiest he’s ever been.
“If I would have told you I wasn’t upset, I would have been lying to you,” he said. “But I didn’t feed that. I fed the future.”
You could tell by the look in their eyes. The expressions on their faces. The tone in their voices. Moffitt understood LSU football wasn’t on a positive trajectory coming off the disastrous 2020 season — that Moffitt himself won’t discuss to avoid speaking poorly about his former employers — in which LSU went 5-5 and had countless issues off the field. Those in the program all understood they needed to turn things around, but when LSU then went out and lost 38-27 to UCLA in the 2021 opener at the Rose Bowl, he knew it was over for Orgeron and this era.
Moffitt has been in this business for 34 years. He’d lost football games before, and he knew the difference between a typical loss and when it was time to start planning something else.
“It was like a tectonic shift in the attitude and the way people looked at you and shook your hand and called your name,” Moffitt said.
Communication from the athletic department went silent. Though Moffitt will not speak on those aspects, many former LSU staffers described a time of zero communication. They’d heard from peers that athletic directors often go quiet when a coaching change is coming, and that signal was clearly received last fall. Orgeron and LSU reached an agreement Oct. 17 for him to leave the team after the season.
Moffitt and former Tennessee head coach and LSU assistant Derek Dooley used to joke about the way people start closing their doors when they’re looking for another job. There used to be an observation deck overlooking the weight room over the supplement area, and Moffitt could always tell something was up when someone would close the door to that room and he could see them through the window pacing on their cellphone. In those fall months, Moffitt saw a lot of closed doors. He had people going up to him and asking, “What are you gonna do?”
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The truth is he wasn’t going anywhere. Baton Rouge is home to him now after 23 years in town. He raised three sons here, two of whom graduated from LSU, playing football and baseball, and another is about to be a senior at Baton Rouge’s Catholic High. Moffitt was going to try his best to be kept on board. He wasn’t hunting for other gigs. He knew his life would be OK either way. He understood he made more than $500,000 a year and had been well taken care of for quite a while.
The difficult part was thinking of his staff. He had a large team of primarily younger coaches working under him, people with families of their own who didn’t have the same security. If Moffitt wasn’t kept, they surely wouldn’t be, either, and that was what motivated him to at least try to get some answers.
Still, he understood the reality.
“I wanted to enjoy my last six or eight weeks there and do the very best job that I could do and really focus my energy on the players,” Moffitt said. “They are the ones who matter. The coaches, we all got paid out handsomely. We weren’t out there risking our lives every Saturday for this team. So I tried to be a good leader and talk to people. Because the players would come talk to me and say, ‘Coach, what is gonna happen?’ I would just try to be there for them, and I found a great deal of comfort and reward in that.”
The coaching rumors swirled constantly in those weeks, from Jimbo Fisher to James Franklin to Mel Tucker to Lincoln Riley. Very few had any expectation for it to be Kelly leaving the power he’d built up north at Notre Dame to try rebuilding an SEC program in the south.
That’s when things really got weird.
There were five weeks between Kelly’s hiring and LSU’s bowl game Jan. 4. For those five weeks, Kelly and his top lieutenants just observed. But Kelly didn’t speak to hardly anyone. Multiple sources call it one of the strangest transitions they’d ever experienced. Assistant coaches were expected to go on the road recruiting for a coach who wasn’t speaking to them. One assistant coach told The Athletic that Kelly told him on the phone they’d talk soon and never did. LSU had visitors in town for a recruiting weekend and asked none of the coaches to be there, one source said. Revered LSU cornerbacks coach Corey Raymond was expected to be a priority to retain, but Kelly had new safeties coach Kerry Cooks go see one of Raymond’s recruits instead. After two weeks of no word, Raymond left for a job at Florida. The majority of assistants stayed on through the bowl game with no clarity other than a general sense that they weren’t going to be retained.
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When Miles was hired in 2005 after Saban left for the Miami Dolphins, he had a meeting with all the leftover staff members on a Sunday and asked, “Who wants to stay? You hang out here and we’ll talk.” There was none of that this time. The Orgeron hire had a different dynamic because he was interim coach for two months and had worked with the entire staff for two years. Moffitt recalls noticing only 10 men on the field for a special teams snap during a game against Missouri and calling it out. Orgeron went over to Moffitt on the sideline and said, “I don’t know if I’m going to get this job, but if I get another job, you’re gonna be the first person I hire.”
This time, Moffitt spoke to Kelly only once briefly at a function at Tiger Stadium. Then Kelly was off recruiting. Moffitt understood what was happening, so he focused his efforts on helping his staff members find other jobs.
Then, he was finally called to meet with Kelly.
“You seen the movie ‘The Green Mile’?” Moffitt said. “Yeah, that’s how it felt. Like I was going to the electric chair.”
Even the staff members in operations or player relations or working reception — the kind of staffers normally not let go in such transitions — worked through the bowl game, then were told by administrators they would not be retained and would be paid for another month.
The sense from the Kelly staff was that LSU had cultural issues and the program required a complete rebuild. It’s part of why sources said LSU and athletic director Scott Woodward didn’t look at head coaching candidates with connections to the Miles or Orgeron regimes. So aside from a few key employees, the LSU football program was going to be built back up from scratch. Kelly even delayed the start of spring practice to get his processes and systems in place.
It just meant the fired employees had to start over, too.
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“Last year was my 34th year of coaching,” Moffitt said. “I’ve been around it, so you’re naive to think you’re gonna be one place your entire life. So every day I stepped on that practice field, every day I opened that weight room door and walked in was a blessing. I was prepared for it. It hurt, but it’s not the end of the world.”
So what’s next? What do you do when for 34 years your entire identity has been wrapped up in helping young men get better and you suddenly have no team to coach? He was frustrated, of course. Knowing Moffitt is knowing intensity at all times. But he had to figure out how to channel that intensity into something other than sulking. “If I focused on mediocrity and wallowed, that would be my future,” he said.
First, Moffitt went hunting. He did a lot of hunting. He still does every chance he can. But that takes up only so much time. He had friends who offered him some good opportunities, but he turned those down. He wanted to process the last couple of years first, “because I thought I would have done my employer a huge disservice because I had some things to process and I would not have been able to focus on my next job,” he said. So when he wasn’t hunting, he was spending his time going over data, evaluating everything he did at LSU, what was good, what was bad, what he would do differently if it came back up. “There were days I spent 10 hours going through stuff,” he said.
Moffitt has stayed busy. He writes training programs, strategizes his next move, talks to people, helps people, speaks with college staffs and high school coaches, presents at clinics and conferences, starts projects he isn’t ready to discuss but he’s energized by. He spends time with his family — his sons and his wife, Jill. He’s made two trips to see family back home in Tennessee. He cuts his grass and uses the weedwhacker. “You oughta see my yard,” he boasts. He rides his bike and works out and does things he just couldn’t do before. “Just staying busy, man. Just livin’ life.”
“I could not be happier right now,” he continues. “I am as happy right now as I have ever been my entire life.”
He knows many coaches from over the years who are still bitter about firings, who continue to bring up the school that’s still running their scheme after firing them 10 years ago, and he refuses to be that guy. Moffitt tries to operate with the awareness that he spent three decades at powers like Tennessee, Miami and primarily LSU and got to build something. Twenty-three years running a program is not the norm.
But this time away is also enough to make him hungry again. Through all those hours of studying data and evaluating his past choices, he wants to get back out there. He talked to Jill and the kids and is in the process of charting out the next move. “I am more motivated than ever to coach again,” he said. He doesn’t care if it’s in a private facility or as an analyst or an administrator. He’s just his happiest when he’s part of a team. “I’ll coach at Springfield High School,” he said.
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The point is he’s going to be back out there in the next coaching carousel. He’s going to go for big jobs again and try to build something.
For the first time in his life, this constantly moving ball of energy had nothing to do. He leaned into it, and it’s made him feel more purpose than ever. He got fired, but the sun came up, and Tommy Moffitt is gonna be just fine.
(Top photos of Tommy Moffitt and Brian Kelly: LSU Athletics and John Korduner / Getty Images;
Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic)
