Athletics department and Fans. My understanding is that Nikki asked for the Simeone Augustus Statue first. Then she got Crickets. Kim comes in and they put one up. Fans never packed the PMac for Nikki. don't you think that hurt her recruiting ? Kim 1st year yall had sellouts. You all did not do this for Nikki. IMO...Shame shame !!!
Fargas only has herself to blame for why things didn't work out at LSU. LSU fans were extremely excited when she first came here. She had a lot of success in the post season especially with the player she inherited from Van Chancellor. But Nikki was never able to win a single NCAAT game with a team of her own recruits. LSU was a middle of the road SEC team (not bad but not great) and was rarely ever in the top 25 (maybe a week here and there). The product got worse towards the back end of her tenure because her recruiting was god awful. LSU was lucky in her final years just to break 50 or 60 points, it was terrible basketball. Watching paint dry was more fun than watching some of these games (which I still watched). If it wasn't for her having a niece being good at basketball (Pointer), it would have been much worse. Nikki was an incredibly lazy recruiter. One of Louisiana's top recruits in recent years (who ended up going to Baylor) only got a letter in the mail. Fargas never actually went out to see her in person.
She completely dissolved the booster club. She got rid of a lot of things that had been ongoing since the Gunter and Pokey days. And she often would not even attend events with boosters/donors and instead would just send her assistant coaches instead (Tasha Butts especially). The booster club was basically empty by the end of her last year.
Kim got support like no other off the bat because she is one of the most decorated coaches of all time and is a Louisiana native. She has 3 national titles and has done nothing but be successful. She won immediately.... in year one Kim finished higher in the SEC than any year Fargas did and had them ranked in the top 25 (which Nikki never did outside a spurt of a week or two here and there).
And while Kim may be controversial, she is one of the hardest workers out there. She is constantly going out in the community weekly to raise money and promote ticket sales. The night before the TN game, Kim was in Lafayette doing a dinner event to raise money and to get more people in the booster club. She upgraded a bunch of the facilities on the money SHE raised, not LSU just handing the money over.
I can promise you, if Kim had a middle of the road SEC team, not in the top 25 and produces a bland product... the attendance will look exactly like it did at the end of the Fargas era. Pokey/Gunter were putting 10,000+ in a seat. Fargas's inability to put a quality product on the floor, be competitive and promote her own program is why the PMAC became a morgue in her final years.
The statue? I would probably take it up with the former AD Joe Alleva who was terrible. He was incredibly lazy and let many subpar LSU programs tread water and not make changes because he refused to want to deal with any of it. LSU got a new AD a couple years ago.