30 seconds with Sam Nader

Ever wonder what’s required off the field for the LSU football team to make it to a bowl game?

As millions stay glued to their TVs this bowl season, what will be happening behind the scenes for LSU’s Tigers? Sam Nader, assistant athletic director for football operations, opened up about bowl-game planning and logistics.

What’s your role with the program?

I’m responsible for things like team travel, liaising with all the support systems for the players, academics, cafeterias, housing. I’m also responsible for helping our coaches with on-campus recruiting.

What does it take to prepare for a bowl game?

When we go to a bowl site, we’re going to try to mimic a game at home in terms of how we practice. We almost set up a football operations building in the hotel. … Each of the position coaches has a meeting room where they meet with [their] players. There’s an hour worth of video sessions looking at our opponent before we go practice. … When we go on the planning trip right after we know which bowl we’re going to, the business people meet with the hotel people and talk business. I look at the meeting spaces and figure out how we’re going to set up. We figure out where to practice. … Then we’ll come back, and typically the bowl people come meet with us, sit down and go through all of the events.

How do you decide how close to stadium you’ll stay?

The No. 1 requirement is that it’s a good property with good meeting space and that they’ve done teams before, and that they know how to handle a team. The truth is, the hotels at the bowl games have been selected for you because they have to make reservations in advance. The bowl has to have hotels for you because you can’t take a chance … on all the hotels in town being booked to where they don’t have room for a team anymore. The bowls themselves will reserve hotels probably at least a year in advance, and they know which hotels have done a good job with teams and which don’t have the experience.

How often do you have to adapt when things go wrong?

If you do a good job of preparing ahead of time, things usually fall in place. You do run into issues sometimes. For example, last year the Cotton Bowl changed their date because they got Cowboys Stadium and they got a prime-time slot with the television people, so they moved their date back. Our hotel had a huge convention booked … When it got moved to Jan. 7, they already had this convention booked and couldn’t move it, so for the first couple days of our stay, we were in there with 1,000 other people. It made for a real problem for us in our meeting space.

What’s the craziest thing that’s happened in planning for a bowl game?

It was Coach Miles’ first bowl game: the Peach Bowl in 2005. We had a huge airplane because we’re taking families and the whole squad. We got on this big jet here in Baton Rouge, and we’re taxiing off to go to Atlanta, and the plane goes off the runway and gets stuck in the mud. So we all have to get off the plane and go back in the terminal, and they have to send for another plane. We had to wait about four or five hours with the whole team, their families and the administrators. And we have to feed the kids, and the poor little restaurant in the airport couldn’t accommodate. All the coaches’ little kids are frustrated and running up and down in the airport. It was a real test of patience.