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It has turned the knees of All-Americans to goo. It has caused coaches to lose their coaching minds.

It only happens at a special space at a special time. LSU can be up, LSU can be down, but LSU’s best weapon remains … sunset.

Actually, it’s what comes after the sun sets. Dark. That combined with Tiger Stadium on a Saturday night is something loud, strange and holy. There is noise in stadiums everywhere from Eugene to Tuscaloosa. Only in Baton Rouge is there a living, breathing being lurking in its grand, old stadium.

“Tiger Stadium is haunted,” former LSU player John Ed Bradley said, “and all the ghosts favor the home team.”

This is an issue this week because for the first time in 50 years, two top five teams in Tiger Stadium kick off — when else? — at night on Saturday. No. 1 Florida and No. 4 LSU meet in what, for now, is the biggest game of the college football season if for no other reason than recent history. Since 2006, the winner of this game has won the national championship.

LSU has won its first five, rising from No. 11 in the preseason to within shouting distance of No. 1. The Tigers are 99th in offense and won last week at Georgia with the help of a bogus excessive celebration penalty. That seems laughable at LSU where every game involves excessive celebration. LSU has won 32 consecutive Saturday night games and is 45-4 at night this decade.

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BATON ROUGE – LSU’s College of Music & Dramatic Arts raised the curtain on a new era Sunday, Sept. 20, as it celebrated the completion of the $22 million renovation of its historic building.

Before a large crowd of alumni, current students and members of the public, faculty and members of the LSU community held a rededication and ribbon-cutting ceremony in the newly restored Claude L. Shaver Theatre.

In addition to the revamped state-of-the-art theater, the building will now be one of the foremost educational performance arts facilities in the Southeast. New smart classrooms, teaching studios, performance theaters, practice rooms and design shops will provide students with the most up-to-date training available.

Some say the best college football is played in the South. That’s debatable.

Some say the best college football and college baseball combination is in the South. Unless there’s someone out there that has come up with a divine formula to tell us otherwise, that’s not an opinion. That’s simply fact.

LSU tops our list of colleges with the best baseball and football program combination. The Tigers have won a pair of national titles on the diamond this decade. The football program also has won a pair of title this decade.

Other SEC representatives include Florida, Georgia and Mississippi.

Close behind LSU in the pecking order is Texas. The Longhorns played for the national title last season and last won a baseball title in 2005. The football program also won a national title in ’05 and is expected to contend for the title this fall.

Oklahoma has experienced success in both sports and joins Texas on the list.

ACC representatives Miami, Georgia Tech, Florida State and Clemson round out our list.

1. Louisiana State. It doesn’t get better than LSU when it comes to the baseball and football programs. The Tigers won their sixth national title on the diamond with a series win over Texas last season. The football Tigers have won a pair of national titles this decade. The last national title was in ’07. In addition to their success on the field in both sports, the Tigers also have the luxury of playing in Tiger Stadium in football and Alex Box Stadium in baseball. LSU fans also are as loyal as they can come. LSU can take pride in being the best baseball-football college.

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Jason Feirman/LSU Sports Information

By Graham Hays
ESPN.com

There should have been so many more decades to find the right words to explain Robyn DesOrmeaux. There should have been so many stories that they piled atop each other, first forgotten, then remembered and eventually embellished a dozen times in old age.

There should have been so much time.

Instead, DesOrmeaux, the starting goalkeeper for the LSU women’s soccer team just five years ago, is gone at the age of 27. This past Thursday, time ran out in her five-year battle with cancer.

“She just kept fighting,” former LSU coach George Fotopoulos said. “Some people do this, you see it in stories or you see it in movies, where people say, ‘George, it’s just my time to go.’ And they just give up.

“She never gave up.”

The stories that remain are painful parables of a personality. They are not the soft, comforting stories told from a distance of time to remember what was. They are the raw, fresh stories by which we reassure ourselves that we will not forget what never can be again. They are her.

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Fotopoulos was the coach who recruited DesOrmeaux at LSU. In fact, she was one of the cornerstones of his first recruiting class in 2000 — a decorated youth player in Louisiana who had yet to sign with a college when the Tigers’ new coach, intent on keeping the state’s best talent from straying to more established programs, pitched her on coming to Baton Rouge. So when a trainer called him early in her freshman season with news of a knee injury for the keeper, his thoughts immediately turned to which drill might possibly have put the season in jeopardy.

Only it hadn’t been a drill with the strength coach or a collision in a scrimmage. As DesOrmeaux calmly explained when he finally reached her on the phone, she had been trying to help someone back a car out of a parking space at church when the driver inadvertently ran over her leg.

Her season cut prematurely short, she wasn’t angry. As her coach recalled, her response was typical Robyn: It was an accident; the driver didn’t mean to do it. It happens.

“And here I am, selfishly saying, ‘Oh, what am I going to do now?’ Here’s my starting goalie. It’s my first year; I’m trying to change the program around. I need this girl,” Fotopoulos said. “So what does Robyn do? She takes a negative and makes a positive. She goes and she just, as a freshman, embraces our junior goalkeeper and our senior goalkeeper. And [she] spends that season being just an unbelievable supporting person for them, giving them confidence, praising them when things were down, lifting them up when practices were hard.

“I mean, we went on to have a 15-win season with two goalkeepers that, I mean, are nice kids but nowhere near the ability of Robyn. And I’m totally convinced it was Robyn who made them a better player, not me. She made them a better player because of the confidence she gave them and the belief and the faith she gave them to persevere and to excel.”

By the time her career was over, DesOrmeaux was LSU’s winningest goalkeeper. But that early hurdle was who she was, the unassuming player who tried to assure Fotopoulos she was worth his time in the recruiting process, even as he offered his best sales pitch about a possible professional career and national team dreams. The devout person of faith who also loved rap music and wowed even the musically skeptical with the Christian rap video she put together.

“Some people do this, you see it in stories or you see it in movies, where people say, ‘George, it’s just my time to go.’ And they just give up. She never gave up.

” – Former LSU coach George Fotopoulos, on Robyn DesOrmeaux

And she was the competitor who constantly demanded the Jugs machine firing soccer balls at the keepers in practice be turned to a faster speed. By her coach’s reckoning, the welts on her stomach were a message intended for anyone with thoughts of taking away her position.

She was all of it, as inherently good and decent as she was naturally Louisianan.

“We were on a bus one time coming back from a game,” Fotopoulos recalled. “And in Louisiana, at certain parts of the year, there’s frogs everywhere. And we’re driving down the interstate — and we have girls from everywhere; we got girls from Florida, California and Colorado — and this is just Robyn: I see all this and I say, ‘Man, look at all those frogs.’ And she goes, ‘Can we stop, Coach?’”

Stop for what, Fotopoulos wanted to know.

“We’re going to eat them!”

She was also, as she often told her coach, the greatest crawfish cook in the state of Louisiana.

Diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma in November 2004, at the end of a senior season in which the mounting back pain present through much of her time in college cut short her playing time, DesOrmeaux fought the disease for five years. There was a period of remission, but the blog her mother updated throughout the years tells an agonizing story of hopes raised and dashed, of prayers requested not for a miracle cure but for a night of pain-free sleep for her daughter.

There is an easy cynicism that comes in an age when almost no story goes untold and no news is out of reach. We hear feel-good stories about people, often athletes, overcoming long odds and hideous diseases. We hear so many that they almost become rote. It’s the cautionary tale with a happy ending, the lesson that we shouldn’t take anything for granted — but not to worry; the heroes in question survived their adversity to live a long and happy life. At worst, we roll our eyes and mock. At best, after enough repetition, the stories simply lose some of their power.

Jason Feirman/LSU Sports InformationThe Tigers will wear a patch this season commemorating the 109 percent effort DesOrmeaux said she’d give every day (combining her No. 99 jersey and the 10 percent chance of her surviving five years given by her doctors).

But no matter how many times those stories are told, or how often the percentages say they happen, each is individually miraculous. All too often, there is no happy ending. For all the inspirational appeals, fundraisers and compassion that are trademarks in the buildup to a typical happy ending, there is often only the pain that comes from having the courage to forestall the inevitable.

With each phone call between the two over the years, Fotopoulos heard both the insatiable optimism DesOrmeaux refused to abandon and the frequent disappointment of another failed drug trial or treatment. But perhaps the most telling were the calls that went to voice mail, an old recorded greeting offering the sound of a voice unburdened and unbowed by all that was to come. And it’s the memory of both voices, the tired and the triumphant, that remind people such as Fotopoulos of someone who changed the way they looked at the world

“When I first got to LSU, you know, everything is about winning. Win, win, win. Win at all costs because that’s the only thing that matters,” Fotopoulos said. “Robyn DesOrmeaux changed my life, not just in the later years, even in the beginning.

“Robyn DesOrmeaux made me a better father; she made me a better husband; and she’s for sure made me a better coach. Because she reminded me, and she taught me, that it is not my responsibility to make better players. It’s not my responsibility to win championships. Because those things are great, and they come and they go and everything else like that. She reminded me many times it is my responsibility to help make better people, to affect people’s lives because in the end, that’s what is really going to matter.”

Fotopoulos said he cried three times Thursday. The first when he found out that DesOrmeaux had passed away. Another time when he told his wife. And the third time when he spoke to a family member and learned it was DesOrmeaux’s wish that he be a pallbearer at her funeral.

There is no way to make sense of DesOrmeaux’s death and no moral to the story that explains away a tragically brief life. There is only the truth she chose to live by, that whether we’re given more or less time than we deserve, the surest way to lose is to worry only about winning.

“She always let me know that it was OK to want to win, and winning was important,” Fotopoulos said. “But she always reminded me, too, ‘Coach, what’s more important is having an effect on people’s lives.’”

She lived that lesson more effectively in her 27 years than most of us will in our lifetimes.

Graham Hays covers women’s college soccer for ESPN.com. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.

LSU Alters Funding Proposal for Business Education Complex

by The Associated Press
Wednesday August 26, 2009, 10:32 AM

 LSU is banking on reduced construction costs in a new proposal to jump-start its planned Business Education Complex.

LSU now plans to use an internal bridge loan, instead of previously proposed new market tax credits, to fill the university’s funding gap for the $60 million project.

“This is a critical time, and we need to push forward,” LSU Chancellor Michael Martin said on Tuesday.

Some in the LSU System office and on the LSU Board of Supervisors had concerns about using complicated new market tax credits, Martin said, especially because LSU had never ventured into that arena before.

Because construction costs are reduced after previously going sky-high in the wake of Hurricane Katrina now is a good time to use a bridge loan and hope that construction bids come in well under the $60 million budget, Martin said.

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LSU’s business and engineering programs are also ranked by U.S. News & World Report. The LSU E. J. Ourso College of Business moved up from being ranked 74 last year to 57 this year in the Best Undergraduate Business Programs ranking. The LSU College of Engineering moved up from being ranked 86 last year to 85 this year in the Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs ranking.

It should be noted that these rankings are based on 2008 data and information and do not reflect the recent budgets cuts for LSU. Those cuts will be reflected in next year’s list.

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