You can find a litany of different definitions and descriptions of Louisiana, be it a Google search, an old-school dictionary or word of mouth.
Or, you could just talk to Mickey Joseph.
He’s Louisiana personified; a Marrero, Louisiana, native who’s coached in the Pelican State at the prep levels and almost every single level of college football within the border of his native and nationally renowned talent-rich state.
Joseph also is the new head coach at Grambling, an iconic HBCU institution some 300 miles from his hometown.
“I’m honored to be the head coach at Grambling State University,” the personable Joseph told FootballScoop. “There’s not an FCS program alive that has the prestige and national brand that Grambling has. When you say Grambling State, you understand who we are, what we’ve done in the past and what it means to so many people around the world.
“The program has taken a hit with losing seasons and we have to get us back on the right page. And I think we can do that with the players, support staff and coaches we have in the building.
“One thing I’ve learned in 20-plus years of coaching, everybody has got to be on the same page. We have got to have everybody pulling on the same side of the rope.”
Thus, Joseph – his most notable coaching stints part of LSU’s most recent national championship, as well as part of the rebuild at his alma mater, Nebraska – attacks the post with a vision extending far beyond hashmarks.
There are people to meet, thousands of alumni to greet and a vision to disseminate before the team’s 2024 season-opening tilt in-state at FBS program Louisiana, expected to challenge for a Sun Belt Conference title.
A Grambling program coming off a season in which three of its six losses were by a total of 10 points is not a program Joseph wants to raze.
“Especially when you take a job and everybody expects you to win, you have to give them your vision and let them share in it,” Joseph shares with FootballScoop. “Part of my vision here is that we want to restore order. Everybody works together to stay on the same page with our young men, because it takes all of us and then you can get them going in the right direction.
“They lost a lot of close games last year, and, honestly, most games last year you could say they beat themselves. We had to clean up some structure in the program, on the field. They led the country in penalties last year but were in the top-50 in (positive) turnover margin. So, I don’t want things to be a secret when it comes to our vision for how we want to our program to be.”
Joseph & Co. are blending newcomers from the NCAA Transfer Portal with a core group of returning players.
Even their Portal approach shows a keen understanding of the fierce pride seemingly entrenched in ballers from ‘The Boot.’
“Most kids we targeted were kids from Louisiana,” Joseph tells FootballScoop, noting some 33 to 40 newcomers are joining roughly 25 returners. “Shreveport, Monroe, Baton Rouge and New Orleans; that’s the bulk of our roster and we feel those four places play really good football and, honestly, there’s really good football played all over the state. We’re going to be an inside-out program and start in the state of Louisiana.
“We don’t have to introduce those guys to jambalaya, fried catfish and beans.”
Most of Joseph’s acclaimed coaching staff also needs no introduction. Both offensive coordinator Eric Dooley and defensive coordinator Jason Rollins have head coaching experience; Joseph believes former LSU standout Shyrone Carey, Grambling’s outside receivers coach, and inside wideouts coach Kris Peters are on upward coaching arcs.
All of which brings Joseph back to his program’s foundational tenet: everything matters.
Every. Single. Detail.
“Nothing is small in this program. Everything is big,” Joseph says. “We attack problems not people. We’re going to clean up penalties, not have all these moving violations penalties from last year. We’ve been able to bring referees back to practice so that practice is like a game.
“First-and-15 is so much more difficult than first-and-10. We have to eliminate that, and we have consequences for that. We make you think. We put them in more situational football, from four-minute drill to two-minute drill; we’re running the middle-eight (minutes) drill.
“One thing I learned from being at LSU with Coach O (Ed Orgeron) is how to have a structured practice. We’ve got some periods that 12, 13 minutes; that period is like a quarter in a game. We’re helping coach them to focus for that long, and we’ve got to keep our focus.”