Scott Woodward is out as LSU’s athletic director, the varsity introduced Thursday night time, simply days after the Tigers fired coach Brian Kelly amid a 5-3 season.
Verge Ausberry, the chief deputy athletic director, would be the interim athletic director.
“We thank Scott for the final six years of service as athletic director,” mentioned Scott Ballard, LSU’s board of supervisors chair. “He had a whole lot of success at LSU, and we want him nothing however the most effective sooner or later. Our focus now could be on shifting the athletic division ahead and greatest positioning LSU to realize its full potential.”
LSU will maintain a information convention at 9 a.m. ET Friday to debate the athletic director change.
Woodward drew the ire of Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, who publicly criticized him a number of instances this week. In a information convention Wednesday, Landry mentioned that Woodward wouldn’t be hiring LSU’s subsequent soccer coach.
On the “Pat McAfee Present” on Thursday, Landry added: “There’s quite a few dangerous contracts that appear to have adopted Scott Woodward.”
The flurry of feedback from Landry made Woodward’s departure an inevitability. In accordance with a supply, the expectation is that Woodward can be paid out the greater than $6 million he’s owed on his contract.
In a letter addressed to Tiger Nation late Thursday, Woodward mentioned his departure comes “with a heavy coronary heart but additionally with my typical optimism.”
“Others can recap or opine on my tenure and on my selections during the last six years as Director of Athletics, however I can’t,” Woodward wrote within the letter. “Quite, I’ll deal with absolutely the pleasure that LSU Athletics brings to our state’s residents and to the Baton Rouge group. I’ll cherish the unimaginable relationships I’ve constructed inside the College group and past our campus borders. And I’ll fondly keep in mind the nationwide and SEC championships for the enjoyment that they dropped at our student-athletes, coaches, workers, campus group and our unimaginable followers.
“Our College will at all times maintain a particular place in my coronary heart and I’ll by no means be too removed from LSU.”
Woodward is a longtime faculty administrator with a political background and an LSU graduate, the kind of background suited to this model of political soccer. He had been LSU’s athletic director since 2019, a run that included a nationwide title in soccer, the hiring of Kim Mulkey as the ladies’s basketball coach and the firing of males’s coach Will Wade.
Within the wake of Kelly’s firing, Landry lambasted Woodward so bluntly and publicly that it appeared there was no clear path for him to maintain his job.
In a dizzying week, Woodward went from firing Kelly to leaving a job that he had coveted his entire profession. On the 2019 information convention introducing him as athletic director, Woodward mentioned: “Thomas Wolfe as soon as mentioned you could’t go residence once more. However clearly, they’ve by no means been to Baton Rouge.”