By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
One of the Southeastern Conference’s hottest baseball rivalries the last several years will be minus a lot of Tony Chachere’s this weekend when LSU ventures into Lindsey Nelson Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The series opens at 4:30 p.m. today on the SEC Network with a 5 p.m. game Saturday on ESPN2 and the finale at noon Sunday on SEC Network+.
LSU has a Rocky recent history at Tennessee, but Tigers embracing change of scenery.https://t.co/JM0KKkOk83
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) April 3, 2026
But the controversial, peppery and vastly successful Tennessee coach Tony Vitello – sort of the Lane Kiffin of college baseball coaches when he was doing that – will not be there. Associate head coach Josh Elander replaced him last October.
Vitello left Tennessee to become the first college baseball head coach in history to get an immediate Major League Baseball managerial job with no previous experience in pro baseball.
That Vitello, always a maverick, just like Kiffin and Will Wade.
“Love some Tony V!!!!” Kiffin tweeted to Vitello last January 19 when he noticed a tweet by Vitello asking Giants fans to come to a meet and greet in San Jose. Naturally, this did not go over well with LSU fans, who tend to hate certain coaches at other programs … until they become the coach at LSU.
“You’ve only been here for a month,” an LSU fan tweeted Kiffin. “But just know, we don’t like Tony V.”
Vitello has long been disliked by LSU fans, mainly because – like Steve Spurrier at Florida and Nick Saban at Alabama – he beat LSU. Vitello was 12-9 against the Tigers as Tennessee’s coach from 2018-25, including an 8-0 run against the Tigers in Knoxville – a three-game sweep in 2024 over LSU coach Jay Johnson and a five-game sweep over former coach Paul Mainieri in 2021 with three in the regular season and two straight in the Super Regional.
Johnson beat Vitello in SEC series in 2023 and ’25 at LSU, but he never swept him. Johnson was 6-7 against Vitello from 2022-25 with a two-game sweep at the College World Series in 2023, 6-3 and 5-0 in an elimination game.
Last year, No. 4 LSU and No. 5 Tennessee met at Alex Box in a classic confrontation. The Vols led 3-0 going into the ninth, but the Tigers rallied for a 6-3 win with a walk-off, three-run homer by Jared Jones.
“I thought it was a really cool four-year deal,” Johnson told Tiger Rag before the season. “We beat them in Baton Rouge. They beat us in Knoxville. They beat us in Hoover. We beat them in Omaha.”
The two coaches combined for the last three national championships.
Now Johnson will be pulling for Vitello. Growing up in northern California, Johnson has been a life-long Giants fan.
“I think it’s cool. I think it’s awesome,” Johnson said on Wednesday of Vitello going to The Show. “I’m following it closely. That was my team. I’m from Northern California anyways. It was a score you check.”
Johnson has always admired Vitello’s work ethic.
“I really respect what he did at Tennessee,” he said. “We grew up in this thing. I always saw him recruiting everywhere I was. Worked his tail off as an assistant (at Missouri, TCU and Arkansas) and as a head coach. There was a big mutual respect for the work put in before we combined to win the last three championships.”
Johnson is happy for Vitello.
“I think him going to Major League Baseball is great,” he said. “The connection between the college game and professional game is closer and tighter than it’s ever been. I hope he has success. More opportunities for coaches is great.”
And if Vitello wins as he won at Tennessee, MLB may start hiring college head coaches the way the NFL and NBA long have?
And Jay Johnson would be an obvious choice.
“The follow-up to that is I’m very happy with what I’m doing, and I’m exactly where I should be in my life right now,” he said.
But just in case, LSU better make sure the revenue share dollars and other roster budget money flow to Johnson’s program as richly as they do to other major baseball programs, if you want to keep him at LSU for years and years and title after title.
LSU’s plan for the $20.5 million revenue share going into next season has football getting 75 percent of that pie, men’s basketball 15 percent, women’s basketball five percent and baseball and all the other sports dividing the remaining five percent. You’ve got to be kidding me.
Meanwhile other major programs out there have decided their chances of winning a football national title are a pipedream, so they plan to put more money into the rosters of sports in which they feel they can win a national title – like baseball. Schools possibly planning to adopt such a baseball-heavy, football-lighter roster financial strategy are Mississippi State, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Vanderbilt. At some point, LSU will decide what sport it wants to be great at and not so great at perhaps on a year-to-year basis.
And that worries Johnson. So, down the road, do not be surprised if Johnson considers another college program if that program puts significantly more money into baseball via revenue sharing or other pursuits that dramatically increase the roster budget. Or a Major League Baseball managerial job.
“Right now, I have zero interest in that,” Johnson said when asked Wednesday if he even has been interested in becoming an MLB manager like Vitello.
But he added, “at this time.”
One of Johnson’s coaching idols said the exact same thing at his introductory press conference at LSU in 1999.
“I’m very happy to be your coach at this time,” Nick Saban said, and he was gone five years later after winning the championship the previous year.
“I haven’t been offered an MLB job is what I’ll say,” said Johnson, who has already won two national championships at LSU in 2023 and ’25 to Vitello’s one in 2024. “I’m fully into this, and there’s a lot that we need to do to be the best we can be. I want to be the best program in the country forever.”
But will LSU be able to continue to make the financial commitment to baseball rosters when it has made drastic, dramatic and expensive coaching hires in football with Lane Kiffin and now Will Wade in men’s basketball with incredibly expensive roster accruement burdens?
“I’m very interested to see how it goes,” Johnson said with regard to Vitello, who has a three-year contract with the Giants at $3.5 million a year.
But Johnson, who is the highest paid college baseball coach at $3.05 million a year courtesy of a new seven-year deal as of last fall, will be watching the LSU money stream divisions by program as well at LSU.
“That’s why the revenue share thing is important to me,” Johnson said. “Because I put my chips in (with his last contract) before LSU has made a real commitment in this new era of college baseball. And so, I’m hopeful that LSU will do the same thing. Like, I want to do this. This is what I want to do.”
Meanwhile, Ausberry and company will be playing a shell game with their highly paid rock star coaches.
“We just saw the Tennessee baseball coach go to Major League Baseball,” Ausberry told Tiger Rag before the Will Wade investment. “We’ve never seen that before. That could happen with Jay. That could be a new thing. MLB might start trying to get great college coaches. We have to be prepared for it. If that time comes, that would be a decision Jay would have to make – LSU or Major League Baseball.”
Not just between LSU and MLB. Between LSU’s financial commitment to Jay Johnson’s roster and MLB.
Be the first to comment