BlogLab

BATON ROUGE, La., to NEW ORLEANS — None of the wires are labeled. Of course they aren’t labeled.

Kiley Greathouse, an LSU student equipment manager, is up in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome press box Sunday afternoon to set up the LSU coaching staff headsets. It’s usually a pretty easy, routine job because the six wires are normally labeled one through six. Instead, it’s just six different colors with no direction.

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If Steve Ensminger and Joe Brady are going to be able to call in plays in the national championship game Monday, Greathouse needs to get this fixed. Next, he goes to the NFL communications box to access some needed technology. It’s locked and secured by a company called Orgeron Security Countermeasures, which of course shares a very Cajun last name with LSU’s head football coach.

“I can see why Dabo was paranoid now,” Greathouse jokes.

Greathouse can’t access that box. He has no efficient way to figure out these wires. He calls LSU director of equipment Louis Bourgeois, one of head man Greg Stringfellow’s top lieutenants, for help.

Bourgeois arrives at the press box from the field, messes with the wires for five seconds and immediately proclaims, “This is so fucked up.”

In order for Bourgeois to identify each wire — he gave them college names like Ohio State for red and Florida for green — he must go down to the field and try them one by one with Greathouse up in the booth. It gets sorted out, but it takes longer than it should.

These are the battles Stringfellow and his LSU equipment staff wage in the days leading up to an LSU football game. The Tigers are 14-0. They’re No. 1 in the country. They’re about to play for the national title Monday night against Clemson in New Orleans, and LSU gave The Athletic access to tag along and watch this essential and often underappreciated unit prepare for the trip.

Whether it be technology, laundry, football pads or various bizarre tasks, Stringfellow describes the objective of his department as something simple but vast.

“Basically, what I have to do when I go on a trip like this or a trip like Atlanta is take that Football Operations Facility — that 160,000 square feet — and move it to where we’re going.”

The black truck and trailer supplied by the College Football Playoff arrives behind the LSU Football Operations facility in Baton Rouge on Thursday morning. The truck is smaller than they expected. It has no liftgate. It also smells quite a bit like weed.

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“Greg is gonna be pissed,” one LSU equipment staffer jokes.

Stringfellow isn’t happy. He’s already running back and forth from one meeting to another, jumping from one problem to the next. He’s LSU’s assistant athletic director of athletic equipment, a job with more responsibilities than the title explains. He’s also building manager for the fancy new $28 million football facility that’s “his baby.” It’s an hour until LSU practices. It’s a day before LSU takes off for the national championship. The equipment team is in stage one of packing up the 18-wheeler, and it’s always a little hectic in his equipment room. That’s also the fun part.

His top two men in charge, Eric Cookmeyer and Bourgeois, are reclining in Cookmeyer’s office with bodies flying in and out as Cookmeyer types out the itinerary. One guy drops in to make a joke. One student worker has a problem. Most people come by just to shoot the shit. LSU communications director Michael Bonnette stops in for a few minutes to chat. Former equipment manager turned sales professional Ben Bergeson has been hanging out all day. “There are always random people in the equipment room,” Cookmeyer says.

The LSU equipment room is — along with the training and weight rooms — the best place to feel the pulse of the program. It’s where you can find players like Grant Delpit or Joe Burrow for a few minutes. It’s where former stars like Derrius Guice and Odell Beckham Jr. make sure to say hello. At one point Thursday, Cleveland Browns receivers coach and former LSU assistant Adam Henry stops in. Cookmeyer turns around. “See? Always random people.”

Building that environment comes naturally, Stringfellow says, but it’s important. Yes, there are five full-time staffers, but it’s primarily occupied by 13 student-managers in addition to volunteer trainees. That makes it an easy place for players to feel comfortable, and it’s generally one of the more relaxed and free-flowing rooms in the building. Leonard Fournette used to sleep on the couch in Stringfellow’s office when he needed a break. Players like Guice or Hall of Fame center Kevin Mawae keep in close touch with him. There’s a whole wall of lockers just for former players who come by. Stringfellow talked to Beckham probably 10 times this week, as Beckham has given players gifts like Nike Air Max 720 sneakers and Beats headphones.

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The problem with the truck isn’t too much of an issue, but it means LSU will have to pivot and go from two trucks to three, a slight wrinkle in its plans. Thursday is slightly calmer than Friday, when the staff has roughly an hour after practice to frantically wash clothes, pack helmets and load up the last stage of the bus before taking off.

Thursday entails more banter, like the mission to discover who runs the Stringfellow parody Twitter account, GStringsPouch, or first-year assistant equipment manager Luke Dudley’s amusement hearing Stringfellow used to be in charge of handling former LSU coach Gerry DiNardo’s headset cable during games as a student in the 1990s. He even found an old Baton Rouge Advocate article about it called “Keeping up with DiNardo.”

Then there’s the debate over who makes the best gumbo. Stringfellow walks by, and Cookmeyer stops him to ask, “Greg, who’s better?” Stringfellow thinks about it for a second with a smile.

“Me and Louis can go at it a bit,” he says.

Student-manager Griffin Callender speedily rides on the back of a rolling cart with six bags of LSU helmets stacked one on top of another, strolling from one end of the equipment warehouse section to another, where the primary 18-wheeler is being packed for the national title game.

“Do you ever fall off riding it like that?” Callender is asked.

“No way,” he says. But a few minutes later he circles back. “If we did actually fall off, we would never tell you that.” So is that confirmation that he did indeed fall? “I will not answer that.”

The 18-wheeler is one of the three trucks heading to New Orleans, a shorter and simpler trip than games like Arkansas (back roads, hills, curves) or the 21-hour Fiesta Bowl drive to Arizona last year. Items are labeled by where they need to go. Office supplies for coaches go on one truck headed to the hotel. Some training and nutrition supplies go on another truck headed to the Saints practice facility. Game-day supplies like jerseys, helmets, balls and communications equipment go on the 18-wheeler headed to the Superdome, which will then sit in a lot until it’s unpacked Sunday afternoon.

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The packing is directed by Greathouse, a 27-year-old Air Force veteran and therefore a packing expert. “It’s pretty simple packing an equipment truck compared to packing aircrafts,” he says. Greathouse is one of three head student-managers. The 13 students receive various scholarship amounts, but the head managers get full rides. Cookmeyer is in charge of all the students.

Stringfellow is often one to tell reporters the students deserve more attention. They have classes, work shifts for the department, then complete certain tasks — like cleaning, fixing and prepping helmets — on their own time. It takes roughly two hours per helmet when you first start, but most have it down to about an hour on average now. You buff it, polish it, hold it to the light to ensure it’s clean. You attach three stripes, the state and U.S. flags, both LSU logos, a danger notice and the player’s number, then check to ensure there’s zero metal showing on the painted facemask.

“I just organize and point them in the right direction,” Stringfellow says of the students. “They’re the ones who do the heavy lifting.”

Back at the truck, Greathouse explains the slight science involved in packing it. You can’t pack too much weight toward the front or too much toward the back because it will drive poorly. And if you just pile stuff in there, it can slide and fall all over and hurt people when unloading.

“You want to stay on the driver’s good side,” he says, referencing truck driver and former student-manager Scott Stiegman.

They pack about half the truck Thursday before practice. Then, when the last Baton Rouge practice ends Friday afternoon, it’s a mad dash of players throwing jerseys and equipment to staffers so they can load helmets and pads and quickly wash and dry clothes in the behemoth, high-powered machines.

As they pack Thursday, people such as Cookmeyer, Bergeson and others share stories of their equipment travels. Like how they should never take Truck 24. Their eyes all bulge at the thought of Truck 24. One time, when Bergeson was on staff, Truck 24 caught on fire as he drove to a game.

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“Watch it die on the Spillway,” they joke, referring to the 58,000-foot bridge on I-10 between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that crosses over Lake Pontchartrain, the Bonnet Carré Spillway Bridge and the LaBranche Wetlands.

“Eh, some LSU fan will pull up in a boat saying, ‘Need a hand?’ ” head student manager Sam Degeneres says.

Luke Dudley is Ed Orgeron’s equipment guy. That means he follows him around all practice. That means he’s in charge of the horn. That means he sees a lot of things. That means he’s the recipient of a lot of things, as well.

There’s a story Orgeron likes to tell, one he tells nearly everybody when he introduces Dudley. Dudley — known around the program as Maui because he’s from there — was at one of his first practices on the job this fall, still getting used to all of the responsibilities and Orgeron’s signals for when to blow the horn to signal the end of a practice section.

Orgeron was bringing his defensive line up when he lifted his right arm in the air, kind of like a flex. That looked to Dudley like the horn signal, so he blew away. It was 40 seconds early. Everybody at practice stopped in their tracks. Orgeron, upset about the wasted practice time, stormed through his defensive line huddle and screamed at Dudley. The defensive line fell over laughing. Dudley kept his distance for a few drills.

Orgeron and Dudley have a great relationship now, and these moments highlight the life of an equipment manager. They carry odd jobs, sometimes well out of the normal realm of duty. There are stories of managers going to coaches’ houses to perform certain tasks.

There’s a great deal of learning involved, especially the little needs and routines of those in the program. For example, hotshot passing game coordinator Joe Brady only wears waffle crew-neck sweatshirts to games. They didn’t know that. So before the first road game of the year, Cookmeyer and Dudley had to scramble to find him a waffle crew-neck.

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Then there are student-managers like Trey Baskerville, who this season is in charge of quarterbacks. That means he’s Heisman winner Joe Burrow’s direct equipment guy, the one who spends extra time with Burrow, choosing the right footballs and having everything the way the quite-detailed quarterback likes it.

Toward the end of the season, Baskerville got Burrow a gift. It was a picture of Burrow and Baskerville with a caption: “Joe, thanks for letting me hold your balls this season.” When Burrow received the photo, he smiled but didn’t notice the caption. “Read it,” they told him. Burrow then noticed the message. He laughed, said “screw you” and walked out.

Stringfellow’s job is more complicated than just being the man in charge of LSU equipment. He’s an administrator and a building manager and one of the top people in charge of projects. He still oversees the entire staff, but he’s on multiple committees and one of the primary minds behind LSU’s innovative Football Operations Center. “This is his baby,” Cookmeyer said. Soon he’ll have to remodel the trophy cases for the new 2019 awards. They’ll start tearing up the outdoor practice field this week. This all happens under Stringfellow’s watch.

He’s almost always done all these jobs, but the recent title bump to associate athletic director validated the work he does and opened up things for his staff. It meant he could bring back Bourgeois — who spent the 2018 season away from the department — as director of equipment and give Matt Montgomery the “director of Olympic sports equipment” title.

“It made the staff look right, where everybody was treated properly,” he says from the Superdome bench Sunday.

Stringfellow took over the LSU equipment staff legacy started by legend Jeff Boss, who ran the department from 1980 to 2003, when he lost his fight with cancer. Stringfellow — like Cookmeyer, Bourgeois, Montgomery and Dudley — began as an LSU student and worked his way up the ranks, now in his 28th year in the department. Technology has changed dramatically in those 28 years, but the overall operations are pretty similar to how he started in 1991.

It’s a fascinating profession, one of absurdly long hours without the pay of those administrators and coaches they work for. They have weird quirks, like how they always wear shorts, no matter how cold it is. Stringfellow remembers exactly the last time he wore pants to a game — “Arkansas 1992” — and says other members of the SEC equipment community would have some words for him if they saw him in pants.

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It’s a job with wide-ranging duties and without an obvious career path. Dudley wants to go into the operations side of football one day. That’s the path assistant director of operations Jeff Grigus took after eight seasons as equipment manager (like Dudley, Grigus was Les Miles’ equipment guy), but that’s not a common path.

Cookmeyer spent 18 months at Alabama before returning in the spring of 2018. “I came back for a reason,” the Mandeville native says. “LSU is home.” He’s happy at LSU and has no real sense of what his future is. It’s not like a coach who rises up the ranks with great performance whom people notice. Major head equipment jobs don’t open often. Stringfellow is just 46. He’s not going anywhere. Sometimes an assistant or former coach will get a job and take an equipment staffer with them.

But none of the LSU equipment staffers come near complaining about the job, and they definitely won’t this year. Not during an undefeated title run. This is the fun stuff.

“I like the grind of it,” Cookmeyer says. “I like being busy. If I had a 9-to-5 job, I’d be so bored.”

There aren’t enough lockers. Of course there aren’t enough lockers. This isn’t a new problem. NFL locker rooms are generally made for 53-man rosters, but LSU is bringing more than 100 players for the national title game.

Cookmeyer paces and stresses as they prepare the Superdome locker room for the national title game. He’s admittedly a nervous type, taking on some of the anxiety of his mentor Stringfellow when it’s crunchtime. The locker issue is one LSU has seen before. Most first- and second-team players will have their own lockers, while the rest will have to share.

A stroll through the Superdome locker room 24 hours before the game is one of organized chaos. There are boxes and trunks and various blockages scattered with nearly no room to maneuver. It’s difficult to believe it will soon look like a game-day locker room with everything perfectly prepared.

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And as the staff mills about, multiple people bring up comments Orgeron made the day prior at media day. Stringfellow had countless people send him the video of it.

“We come here, everything is set up for us,” Orgeron said of his equipment managers. “Rooms are set up for us. Equipment is set up for us. Practice is set up for us. We feel like wherever we go, we’re practicing at home. Those guys are tremendous.”

Stringfellow brings this up Sunday unprovoked. It means a lot to him and his team to hear the validation of their work from the man in charge. They don’t often get to hear things like that. They like to joke they don’t want Orgeron to ever have to notice them, because if he does, that means something went wrong.

“What he said is exactly what we try to do,” Stringfellow says. “Make it — when you move into a hotel, move into a stadium, move into a practice facility — make it feel like home.”

The equipment staff finishes up Superdome prep and then heads off to manage LSU’s afternoon practice. Later Sunday night, LSU football’s Twitter account posts a video of their preparations.

If all goes to plan, it’s the last we’ll hear about them this week. And that’s just the way they want it.

(Top photo of Luke Dudley by Michael DeMocker)

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