By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
Not Nick Saban.
Not Paul Dietzel.
Not Bernie Moore.
Not Lane Kiffin.
Skip Bertman is the greatest hire in the history of LSU Athletics.
And it was LSU athletic director Bob Brodhead who hired Bertman, an associate head coach/pitching coach for the Miami Hurricanes from 1976-83 with a national championship in 1982. The story made the front page of the Baton Rouge Advocate on Tuesday, April 26, 1983, but it was a non-byline press release. And it appeared under a column about a roller derby match between the Los Angeles T-Birds and the New York Bombers coming up at the Assembly Center that Friday night.
“The potential for a superlative program is here. This opportunity is a once-in-a-lifetime chance,” Bertman, 44, said in the story.
“We are going to have LSU at the top of the heap in all sports,” Brodhead, who had been at LSU less than a year, said with amazing foresight. “Skip will be the man to accomplish this in baseball.”
But Brohead was only partially right in that second sentence. Yes, Bertman became that five times over in baseball as his Tigers won national championships in 1991, ’93, ’96, ’97 and 2000, but he was so much more to LSU.
Bertman died early Friday at age 88 in Baton Rouge after coaching the baseball team from 1984-2001 and serving as athletic director from 2001-2008.
A Celebration of Life service for the public honoring Bertman will be on Tuesday, Aug. 25, at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center at 7 p.m. with the doors opening at 6 p.m., the Bertman family has announced. A ceremony for Bertman family and friends and former LSU baseball players will be held prior to the public ceremony.
As baseball coach, Bertman not only won, he drew crowds to the original Alex Box Stadium almost immediately like a circus barker. He brought in the San Diego Chicken and lined up various promotions as if they were his Southeastern Conference weekend pitching rotation. But first, it was all about hot coffee and clean restrooms. He geared everything to families coming to games. Everything worked.
Few coaches of any sport anywhere were as adept at combining in-game coaching ability, motivating, marketing and making money. LSU became one of the few baseball programs nationally to continually turn a significant profit, and he proudly showed smaller in-state schools how to do the same thing. He also scheduled those programs to showcase LSU, and he regularly took his teams to McNeese State, Southeastern Louisiana, Nicholls State, Louisiana Tech and Northwestern State.
Often, Bertman would show up for practice in a coat and tie with a briefcase after having spoken to a business group or Kiwanis Club or after drumming up financial support for his program. He founded a very lucrative Coaches Committee of leading area businessmen, doctors and lawyers. Everyone was on the team.
“His true legacy is far less about his many accomplishments and much more about the deep personal impact he had on so many.” … LSU great Blair Barbier on Skip Bertman. Excellent piece by @racertodd https://t.co/2SGEH9lpcU
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) August 15, 2026
After retiring from coaching following the 2001 season and becoming athletic director, Bertman skillfully converted his coaching skills to administration like a champion. In fact, he hired four coaches who went on to win national championships.
Those were Les Miles in football after the 2004 season when Nick Saban left to coach the Miami Dolphins. Miles won the national championship in the 2007 season and reached another national title game appearance in the 2011 season. He hired Paul Mainieri from Notre Dame in baseball after the 2007 season. Mainieri won the national championship in 2009 and reached a national title series appearance in 2017.
When track coaching legend Pat Henry went to Texas A&M after the 2004 season, Bertmant promoted assistant coach Dennis Shaver. And he won the women’s outdoor track national title in 2008 and the men’s outdoor track crown in 2021. And Bertman hired Chuck Winstead as men’s golf coach in 2006, and in 2015 Winstead won LSU’s first national title in golf since 1955.
That’s 10 national championships in four sports from one coach/athletic director from 1991 through 2021 at one school. That’s the Midas touch.
Henry won 27 national championships while coaching the men’s and women’s track teams from 1988-2004, but he had a chance to win four national championships every season as he was coaching the men and women. And men’s and women’s track have separate national titles for indoor and outdoor. Henry is the greatest track coach of all time, but he never was an athletic director, who hire the coaches.
And that’s not all.
It was also Bertman who got the new Alex Box Stadium built in time for the 2009 season, just as he was retiring as AD, after working on that for several years with trips to other stadiums before he became AD. And the Tigers just happened to win the national championship that year in a stadium that remains state of the art.
From 1996 through 2001 under Bertman, the old Alex Box led the nation in attendance six consecutive seasons. In the 25 years since Bertman retired from coaching, LSU Baseball led the nation in attendance 20 more times under three more coaches.
And in his second year as AD in 2003 after retiring as coach after the 2001 season, it was Bertman who did what no LSU athletic director in history did, or wanted to do. He directed a game of musical seats with the 91,600 capacity at the time at Tiger Stadium. That’s the building you can see the arches of over Bertman’s right shoulder in the above picture.
It was Bertman who brought LSU Football out of the antiquated age of football season ticket sales and into the future of the very profitable and drastically needed revenue stream of season ticket licensing. Ticket licensing requires present and future season ticket holders to pay hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of dollars just for the right to be able to buy season tickets.
“We were so far behind. We were an outlier,” Scott Woodward told me on June 19, 2019, in an interview for the Skip Bertman book (Everything Matters In Baseball) just weeks into Woodward’s new job as LSU athletic director after leaving Texas A&M. Woodward had been director of external operations from 2000-04 under LSU chancellor Mark Emmert as the Bertman Ticket Doctrine began to take shape.
Bertman had to move large groups of season ticket holders who had passed down their tickets to family members for generations.
“It was like something out of Shakespeare,” Bertman said incredulously at the time. “It was unreal. Only a direct heir could take the throne and get the tickets. There were some families that had like 10 or 20 season tickets for decades.”
And they didn’t care how many national championships Bertman had won in baseball.
“It was seen as a radical thing at first,” Woodward said.
“We’re going to put in a football seating license plan,” Bertman told LSU associate athletic director for communications Herb Vincent at the time. “And they’re going to fire me.”
But as with Bertman’s patented timely hitting that helped him win the five national titles, once he got the controversial plan through via a 15-1 vote by the Board of Supervisors that August, coach Nick Saban won LSU’s first national championship in football since 1958 at 13-1.
“Winning has a good way of curing a ticket price increase,” Woodward smiled. “It was like we kept waiting for this uproar about the ticket licensing, and it never happened, because everyone was so elated about LSU winning a national championship in football. Good timing. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, boy, this is beautiful.'”
Invoices for the new costly football season tickets went out two weeks after LSU beat Oklahoma, 21-14, in the Sugar Bowl for the national title.
“That sure didn’t hurt,” then-associate athletic director Dan Radakovich said.
“Skip’s ticket plan is what brought us into the 21st centry,” Board member Stanley Jacobs said.
Skip Bertman was truly a man for all seasons.
He was likely the Greatest Of All Time college baseball coach with strong arguments from Augie Garrido, who also won five national championships, but at two schools (Cal State Fullerton and Texas) over a longer stretch of time (1979-2005), and from Rod Dedeaux, who won the most at 11 from 1948-78 at USC.
But without argument, Skip Bertman is the G.O.A.T. of LSU Athletics.
And trust me, there will be a full house or close to it at the P-MAC to thank him and tell him goodbye.
He would like that, but not be at all surprised.
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