NATCHITOCHES, La.  — Long before he became the beloved head football coach at undefeated LSU, this is where Ed Orgeron made some of the dumbest mistakes of his life and nearly threw away his future, according to local legend.

It was late 1982. Orgeron had just finished his junior season as a football player at the local university, Northwestern State. But he was on thin ice. He already had quit LSU as a freshman because he was homesick and didn’t like it there. Then after he joined NSU about 180 miles up the road, he had earned a reputation as a hell-raising, curfew-busting barroom brawler.

A new coach had just been hired, Sam Goodwin, who considered kicking him off the team, along with his roommate, after they were accused of trashing a dorm room.

The school’s housing director “took me into this one room, and every piece of furniture in there was broke,” Goodwin recalled this week as Orgeron prepared LSU for the national championship game against Clemson Monday in New Orleans.

“Just a total disaster,” he said. “He told me two of my players did all that, and it wasn’t the first time they had done it. One of them was Bébé Orgeron, and the other Bryan Arceneaux, both of them from South Lafourche.”