By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
Tiger Rag executive editor Todd Horne and I sat down with LSU baseball coach Jay Johnson in his Alex Box Stadium office over his last “free” weekend just before practice started two weeks ago.
My first question was, “It’s year five, when are you going to get this program turned around?”
He didn’t see that one coming, and all he could do was laugh after winning his second national championship in three years at LSU last summer in his fourth season.
Teams often burn or destroy film of a bad game. But LSU Baseball wants to make its 2025 national title “irrelevant.”https://t.co/Z6V8UFEBzi
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) January 23, 2026
A few minutes later, Horne hit him with another curve that caught him off guard. “Do you think about the number three or the number nine more often?”
Perplexed, Johnson said, “What do you mean?”
Then a second later, he got it – LSU’s third national title under him or LSU’s ninth overall?
“Oh. No, neither. I mean that’s so far away,” he said. “And it would be disrespectful to how I want the players to think.”
If Johnson does win another national title this season, that would be three in four years. Not even Bertman did that. The only one who has was USC’s Rod Dedeaux, who won five in a row from 1970-74.
Reaching Omaha, Nebraska, and winning another national championship are so automatically annual goals at LSU again now that they each go largely unspoken by coaches and players. LSU has reached Omaha twice in Johnson’s four years – in 2023 and ’25 – and won the title each time.
Before Johnson reached the College World Series in his second year in ’23, LSU had gone five years between trips to the CWS (2018 through 2022, though there was no CWS in 2020 because of COVID). That was the longest prohibition on LSU in Omaha since the complete history of LSU baseball started in 1893 through 1985 before Skip Bertman’s first trip in 1986.
The way Johnson recruits and coaches, it doesn’t look like he could have a stretch of more than one or two years without reaching 68102 – the zip code for Charles Schwab Field in Omaha.
“When you’re coaching here and you’re playing here, that’s what you’re trying to do,” Johnson said. “We don’t even need to set a goal of going to Omaha or a national championship. Like, that doesn’t even come up, because it’s hey, that’s what we’re trying to do. That’s why we’re here.”
In other words, it’s not given, but it’s a given.
You just don’t talk about it, because it’s so much the Gorilla in the Room that you don’t have to.
“I’ve had some really good mentors,” Johnson said. “I’ve tried to pay attention to great coaches.”
First for the 48-year-old Johnson, going back to when he was just starting out as a coach, is Bertman, who reached the 68107 zip for the former Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha 11 times in 15 years between 1986-2000. Incredibly, once Bertman went in 1986 in his third year at LSU, he never spent more than one season at home in between return trips. The only years he didn’t go over that span are easier to remember – 1988, ’92, ’95, ’99 and 2001 – his last season when he finished one win away.
Johnson also talks a lot about former LSU and Alabama football coach Nick Saban, who made “The Process” famous, but Bertman spoke of it years before he did. Bertman won five national championships
between 1991-2000. Saban won the 2003 football national title at LSU and six more at Alabama from 2009-20.
“Saban is the one who talks about it the most and is most known for it,” Johnson said. “For not saying what you want to accomplish, because everything is how we’re going to do it – the process. And laying out a path to put us in position to accomplish those things.”
Johnson is about the process, but not all about it.
“Some say you enjoy the preparation part more than the winning part?” Horne asked.
“Um, I don’t know about that,” Johnson said laughing.
Those trophy presentations are pretty cool. Bertman and Saban would admit that, too.
And Johnson is gaining on both of them.
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