Louisiana football coach Michael Desormeaux is the perfect fit with Ragin' Cajuns

LAFAYETTE, La. — Michael Desormeaux stepped to the podium at his introductory news conference as the head coach at Louisiana and channeled his Cajun roots. In his typical self-deprecating fashion, he deflected attention and delivered a one-liner straight to a constituency he understands fluently.

«All right, so I'll keep this short,» he said. «I heard they got Jambalaya Shoppe and beer back there, and that's what everybody's here for.»

Desormeaux comes from Cajun central casting, as his family genealogy — handwritten, he points out — traces back to the late 1700s here, when his first family member from France settled in the Acadiana region. His great-grandfather worked in the salt mines, his grandfather grew up as a Golden Gloves boxer and later became a fire chief, and his father played football at LSU.

Desormeaux, 37, is a native of nearby New Iberia and a former quarterback at Louisiana. He drives a pickup truck, loves to both crab and hunt duck. He's quick to point out that gumbo in the Lafayette area is more root-based Cajun style, much different than the tomato-based in New Orleans. He also owns a camp he and his brothers built by hand, of course.

«This is the only job that I'm worried about, that I care about, that I want,» he told ESPN this spring. «I really feel that way. I do feel like this place is unique.»

So when athletic director Bryan Maggard needed a successor for Billy Napier, by far the most successful coach in modern school history, he doubled down on both the school's smashing recent success of consecutive conference titles and the idea of maximizing local resources.

Both Desormeaux's familiarity with the region and the blueprint for winning that Napier unfurled made the choice obvious. Maggard