Ed Orgeron’s performance as LSU interim head coach last season earned him the removal of the interim tag.

He was initially promoted from defensive line coach after an uninspired 2-2 start led to the firing of Les Miles, the second-winningest coach in school history. Orgeron immediately shook up the coaching staff, installed a focused weekly routine and lifted the Tigers’ spirit during a 6-2 run the rest of the way.

After flirting with Houston head coach Tom Herman, who wound up becoming head coach at Texas, the LSU administration entrusted the program to Orgeron.

Orgeron, a native of Larose, La., whose Cajun-flavored growl sounds the way one imagines Mike the Tiger would sound if he could talk, seems properly cast as he settles into what in some ways is the most prominent job in Louisiana.

On Saturday night, Orgeron embarks on his first full season as LSU head coach when the 13th-ranked Tigers play BYU. Fate added a little cayenne pepper to the event when the devastating floods from Hurricane Harvey forced officials to move the game out of Houston.

The game wound up in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans, a mere 80 miles from the LSU campus and no less of a Tigers lair than Baton Rouge. Three times since 2003 LSU has played for national championships in the Superdome, surrounded by raucous purple-and-gold crowds.

Nick Saban’s Tigers beat Oklahoma for the 2003 championship and Miles’ Tigers beat Ohio State for the 2007 championship before Miles’ undefeated and No. 1-ranked Tigers lost to Saban’s Alabama team for the 2011 championship.

This game doesn’t feature those kind of stakes, but the venue is a reminder of where LSU has been under Orgeron’s most recent predecessors and where the school and Tiger Nation expect Orgeron to return the program. And real soon, if you don’t mind.

What to expect? Stay tuned

The expectations for his first full season are more modest, though. In fact no one knows exactly what to expect from this team other than it’s talented enough that Derrius Guice should make first-year coordinator Matt Canada’s offense hum and an inexperienced but very talented group should give second-year coordinator Dave Aranda’s defense plenty of teeth.

Precisely what that translates into as far as wins and losses go, well this opener should give us a better sense of that.

Orgeron received high marks for his interim test last season, but the season that begins Saturday is a Tiger of different stripes.

He can do the interim thing, all right. He did it at USC in 2013, going 6-2 after a 3-2 start led to the firing of Lane Kiffin, uplifting those Trojans much as he did the 2016 Tigers.

But it’s one thing to make tweaks four or five games into a season that’s had a disappointing beginning and ride the momentum and energy of a fresh start. It’s another to remake a staff, adapt to personnel losses, oversee a spring, offseason and training camp and play with “your” team. Not to mention rebuild and sustain an elite program.

This game is the first indicator of whether Orgeron is up to the challenge of being full-time head coach at LSU any more than he was up to being full-time head coach at Ole Miss a decade ago.

If nothing else, the LSU job is in Orgeron’s blood the way no other football program — especially Ole Miss for crying out loud — could be.

Orgeron, who enrolled at LSU but left school without ever playing there, played defensive tackle for three seasons at Northwestern State in Natchitoches, La., about 180 miles northwest of Baton Rouge. Nonetheless the LSU culture is ingrained as deeply in him as it is in any four-year letter-winner or lifelong season-ticket holder.

He understands the history of the program as well as the nuances of the current context of being the Tigers head coach.

After Orgeron agreed to become interim coach, the first phone call he made — after the one to his wife — was to retired long-time LSU defensive line coach Pete Jenkins. Oregeron asked him to take over the position responsibilities that the new interim head coach would have to relinquish, just as he had at USC.

Few men in Orgeron’s position would have had the institutional knowledge to immediately recognize the value of such a position coach hire in midseason. Bringing back the universally respected and loved Jenkins — “a storied legend at LSU,” Orgeron said — for a third stint at LSU reminded Tiger fans that their new coach was one of them.

Jenkins, who turned 76 this week, is described by Orgeron as his “mentor and right-hand man.”

Also as part of the staff shakeup, Orgeron fired offensive coordinator Cam Cameron, who never brought the Tigers offense out of Miles’ grasp and into the 21st Century the way fans had hoped he would when Miles hired him after the 2012 season.

Orgeron placed the offense in the hands of tight ends coach Steve Ensminger, a former LSU quarterback who Orgeron said “bleeds purple and gold.” Ensminger has since resumed his tight end duties after the Tigers increased their scoring average by 50 percent under him.

The 6-2 runs at USC and LSU partially redeemed Orgeron, whose three-year stint at Ole Miss had been a massive failure. Beginning in 2005 Orgeron’s Rebels had records of 3-8, 4-8 and 3-9, going 3-21 in the SEC, including a 0-8 record in his last season.

Some head coaches fail because they fail to learn from their mistakes, falsely thinking they already have all the answers. Oregron freely admits his shortcomings at Ole Miss.

He said his biggest mistake was approaching the head-coaching position as he had his role as a defensive line coach rather than evolving into the CEO role of a head coach.

“You can’t coach a team that way,” Orgeron said. “I went full speed ahead and I wanted to do everything, coach the quarterbacks, the receivers and I don’t know nothing about ’em, but I wanted to do it my way. And I learned about that.

“I think every time you go through a head-coaching job, you learn where your strengths are and your weaknesses are, and the more you do it the more you find out what type of coach you are.”

Orgeron has brought as guests to practice Tiger greats as diverse as Billy Cannon (LSU’s only Heisman Trophy winner), Tommy Casanova (a signature star during the tenure of Charles McClendon, LSU’s winningest coach) and Glenn Dorsey (a signature star during the program’s recent renaissance that features in a five-year span two of the school’s three national championships).

“The expectations are high. I understand that,” Orgeron said. “If you don’t like it, don’t come, you know? We get it. We understand what you gave to us, the accountability we have to the state of Louisiana, to LSU and everybody that’s played here before.”

One thought, one goal: catch Alabama

When Orgeron leads his team onto the field Saturday night, the Red Elephant in the room will be the ghost of the Tigers’ last appearance there when Alabama pushed around one of the most successful Tiger teams ever in a 21-0 title-game flop.

Saban’s Crimson Tide avenged an epic 6-3 overtime loss to the Tigers two months earlier in Tuscaloosa and LSU hasn’t beaten its former coach since.

Alabama has become the gold standard that everyone in college football aspires to match, but that challenge is felt most acutely in Baton Rouge after Saban abandoned LSU for the NFL only to tire of the professional ranks and return to college two years later and become the Tigers’ primary nemesis.

The Tide has won four national championships in Saban’s 10 seasons, leaving LSU fans to wonder what might have been had Saban not felt the need to scratch his NFL itch. The fact that Saban never chose Alabama over LSU — Miles was entrenched as the Tigers coach when Saban went looking for his latest college job — is a distinction without a difference for many Tigers fans.

So Orgeron’s challenge of returning LSU to national-championship caliber requires simultaneously catching up with Saban and Alabama, who the Tigers face the first Saturday in November each year.

“Yes, you are judged by that game. That’s the nature of the beast,” said Orgeron, whose  team went toe to toe with Bama before succumbing 10-0 last season. “I welcome it. I can’t wait till the day we beat those guys. That is the benchmark every day we go to work.”

When he was hired in November, Orgeron thanked the LSU administration “for entrusting me with the greatest job in the country.”

All head coaches should treat and publicly call their jobs the greatest in the country as long as they have them. But on rare occasions a guy gets to hold the one job he sincerely feels is the greatest job for him.

That rare opportunity has arrived for Ed Orgeron, the 33rd head coach in LSU history and the first Louisiana native in more than 30 years to hold the position he called “bigger than life.”

Orgeron coached at nine schools before Miles hired him as an assistant in 2015 and he said “every step I went, I was preparing to come back home to LSU.”

Miles is an Ohio native and Michigan man who came to love Louisiana and felt that love returned for most of his 12-year tenure, though not so much in the latter stages. When Orgeron replaced him, the new coach talked about “re-energizing the passion and the energy in Tiger Stadium” and bringing back “the intimidation of the Tiger family” that he felt whenever he entered the stadium as an opponent.

Orgeron looks the part and sounds the part, and based on last season he seems capable of coaching the part.

Now none of that is going to turn Danny Etling into Bert Jones or even Aranda’s talented defense into the Chinese Bandits.

But all of that is what earned Orgeron the job he has spent his whole professional life preparing for.