LSU's Ralston Turner may have played his last game as a Tiger. (Brianna Paciorka/The Daily Reveille)

BATON ROUGE — Scout.com’s North Carolina State site PackPride.com tweeted earlier Wednesday that Ralston Turner is transferring from LSU and will be taking an official visit there this weekend.

At this point LSU officials have yet to confirm the rumor.

Turner was named to the 2011 All-SEC Freshman team despite missing the first five SEC games after suffering a right foot injury at Virginia on January 2. He started all 27 games he played in and led the Tigers with a 12.3 points-per-game average.

His scoring dipped to 9.1 PPG as a sophomore, with his best game coming in December when he scored 22 points on 6-for-10 shooting, including four three-pointers, as LSU upset No. 10 Marquette in Baton Rouge.

The 6-6 combo guard from Alabama may be looking for a fresh start after new coach Johnny Jones immediately signed two 6-6 players that play the same position in Shavon Coleman and Shane Hammink.

Jones played for LSU in the early 1980’s and was on the 1981 final four team. After his playing career ended, he joined the LSU staff as a assistant and was a key factor in helping land some of the big name players that came through the program during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Jones was sent into coaching purgatory following his recruitment of Lester Earl. Though nothing is definitive, It was alleged that Jones organized and/or handed Earl a brief case full of cash. That incident is what help end the Dale Brown era and send the basketball program on a downward spiral over the next 15-years.

Jones resurfaced in 2001 to become the head basketball coach at North Texas. Through 11 seasons he tallied a record of 190-146. The record doesn’t look that impressive, but when you look at his progression season-by-season, you will see that the record looks better than what it seems. During his first five season, North Texas only averaged 12 wins per year, but the following six they averaged 21 wins. He led North Texas to the 2007 and 2010 Sunbelt Tournament championship (won the regular season title in 2010). Prior to his arrival, North Texas had only made one NCAA tournament appearance in 1988. Jones led them to two appearances (2007 and 2010).

Jones’ coaching record speaks for itself, but didn’t Trent Johnson’s before he arrived. The question is can Jones’ success at UNT translate at LSU. Johnson biggest drawback was that he could not recruit Louisiana at all. Johnson never seemed to get on the same page with high school coaches and AAU programs. A lot of this had to do with Trent’s personality, but most of it was due to the fact that he was an outsider, this is an advantage Jones will have.

His 20-year coaching career has centered around the state and surrounding states. His 11-years at UNT should mean he has in-rows into key Texas recruiting hot-beds like Houston and Dallas. Even more important is that he should be able to assemble a staff that can limit the amount of top recruits to leave the state and come to LSU.

LSU’s hiring of Jones is one that they haven’t tired in over 50-years. Usually LSU goes after a successful mid-major coach that doesn’t have ties to LSU. The closest they had come to hiring anyone with Louisiana ties was John Brady and he only coached high school back in the 1980’s. But is Jones still a relevant name with Louisiana basketball?

Let’s face it, only the over 40 crowd remember him as a players. How relevant is he with current players in high school? More importantly will the new hire restore a much needed face-lift into the program, because right now no one cares about LSU basketball.

Its hard not to run into a die-hard LSU fan living in Baton Rouge. Over the course of the weekend I ran into hundreds on Tiger fans, not a single one of them asked me or talked about the new hire. Sure most of the topics revolved around the success of the baseball team, but it surprised me how irrelevant the news of a new basketball coach brought.

Jones will immediately need to hit the recruiting trail as spring signing has already begun. He will try to assemble a staff and try to fill as many of the five vacant scholarship spots on the team. If he can get a few big name recruits that Johnson failed to secure to become a Tiger, this might be the early spark LSU needs to start to turn the success of the program.

Lets take a quick ride and look at the history of LSU basketball, don’t worry it is a short trip. In over 100 years of men’s basketball, LSU claims to have won the 1935 national championship (LSU actually won the American Legion Bowl, not recognized by the NCAA). LSU won its first SEC championship in 1935 (only its third year in the league), but has only won the SEC regular season title ten times in eighty years and only won the conference tournaments once (1980). Since 1952 LSU had made a post-season tournament 23 times (19 NCAA, 4 NIT) and 21 of those appearances happened after 1978.

LSU basketball has been successful, but only in short spurts. The Tigers had a few good years in the 1950’s thanks to Bob Petite. In the late 1960’s LSU was on national TV weekly to see Pete Maravich play, but most of Maravich’s teams barely won more than half of their games. In 1972, Dale Brown entered the scene at LSU as coach and led LSU into its wining-est era in the schools history. He led LSU to 13 of its 19 NCAA tournament appearances and four of there SEC titles.

Growing up in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was just as big of an event to go to the “deaf dome” for a basketball games as it was for a football game, but all of that changed quick. Following the 1993 season, LSU would go into the dark ages of the sport and have only come out into the sun a few times and that is the problem with the program, lack of stability.

If you were born after 1985 then the only positive memory you have of the basketball program is their sweet-sixteen run in 2000 and their final four run in 2006. In the meantime the baseball and football teams have won multiple championships. So basically the under 30 Tiger fan could give a crap about basketball because of low expectations and the over 50 crowd remembers the dark days before Dale Brown where success only came by a once in a generation player. Leaving both of those bases skeptical of investing their time or money on a product they can’t stand behind.

So where does that leave the program now? In short not good, as it stands now LSU only has nine players coming back and the recruiting class looks weak. The Tigers still have a week to try to fill the five empty scholarships, and at this point only has one recruit committed. LSU has to look beyond just the success of next year’s team, but what level do they want the program to be at in three, five and ten years from now. As Dale Brown showed, with an above average coach and good teams, fans will support this team and LSU can be a productive basketball program.

I read an article the other day about how the basketball team is at the same crossroads that the football team was before they hired Gerry Dinardo. I respectfully have to disagree. The main reason is that the fans have always been behind the football team, but if you have been to the PMAC in the last three years or just try to find someone to talk LSU basketball, there just isn’t many fans out there. The PMAC holds over 13,000 fans per home game, but since 2000 only five years has had an average attendance of over 9,500 fans. What Joe Alleva has to do is figure out how to get fans interested in going to the PMAC and following the basketball program.

The first thing Alleva has to do is find the coach that creates a little buzz in Baton Rouge. Alleva has already done this by hiring Trent Johnson back in 2008. Just look at the attendance in 2008 (John Brady’s last season) the average home attendance was 8565, but just a year later the attendance jumped to 10,373. Where things went wrong for Johnson was that we could not recruit, this is what Alleva needs to get right this go around. LSU needs a coach to can set up a fence around the state in recruiting and be able to get into the in-rows of local AAU basketball teams (something Johnson was terrible at). It also would not hurt if the coach has some ties to Texas recruiting and why not be a former coach and player.

Think this guy is hard to find, he isn’t. The coach LSU needs is currently located at North Texas. Johnny Jones played and was an assistant coach for LSU during the Dale Brown era and has spent the last decade turning North Texas into a successful program. The LSU coaching shoe seems to fit Jones perfectly, but would he be interested in taking over a program that might seem to some as beyond repairable? If LSU can get Jones and he can recruit New Orleans and Baton Rouge then he should be able to sustain the level of success John Brady had in the middle part of the 2000s.

The other part of Alleva’s job is to improve the overall fan experience at the PMAC. LSU hasn’t had to do this in football and baseball, so I understand how slow the athletic department has been in making changes. Over the past three seasons the best thing LSU has done is lowered ticket prices on both season and individual game tickets. For 100 dollars you can get season tickets and 10 dollars earns you individual game tickets, but money isn’t the problem. Lowering ticket prices is the same as offering two-for-one specials on sand in the sierra, it doesn’t matter what price you make tickets when people don’t want/need it. Alleva could attract more crowds by scheduling more interesting home games. The best LSU did last year was Marquette and Virginia, only two out of conference games against teams in the top-25 (when they played them). Both game attracted large crowds for OCC matchups and both game were extreamly entertaining. The SEC already has agreements with other conferences for yearly matchups, but normally the conference tries to match teams up against one another equally. Last year LSU traveled to Rutgers, what was the good in that? How hard would it be to schedule a home and home with Texas, Memphis, or Louisville? All would love to come here for recruiting and the home games would surely draw well and air nationally. Lets give LSU fans the chance to go out and watch a good team (even if it isn’t LSU) and the chance to root the Tigers on in a possible upset would be great for the morale of the program.

If you went to a game in 2000 and didn’t return until 2012, almost everything would look and feel the same in the PMAC. Sure the seats have changed colors, but that is about it. Where is the fan interaction? Last week I took my nephew to a Hornets game (the tickets were free). I was amazed at the interaction between the team any myself. I sat in good, but not great seats (lower bowl in a curve), but all game had waitresses (not vendors) coming by asking if I wanted food or drinks. For thirty dollars I signed my nephew up for the kidz club in which he received a backpack, shorts, basketball, ball cap, binder, lanyard, a Hornet’s bobble-head, and numerous other toys and decals. You don’t think this kid is a Hornets fan for life? Of course he is. It is an opportunity like this LSU needs to take advantage of. LSU needs to give us a reason to get out of our recliners and watch the game from the PMAC instead of on TV or online.

Obviously, I could write a book on how to improve fan interactions across the board, but I won’t for now. Instead I will ask you, what will it take for you to go out to watch a LSU basketball game at the PMAC? Is it only about putting a good product on the floor, or would an exciting opponent and a fun environment pull you out to the arena no matter what the outcome was?