BATON ROUGE—The straw hat doesn’t look so valuable. The purple band is a bit faded, and the bill is slightly frayed. If the hat hadn’t belonged to such an important figure, it would have been tossed into the garbage long ago. After all, it is two decades old.
And yet, here it sits, inside an office on the second floor of LSU’s athletics administration building, steps from Tiger Stadium, alone on a table like a piece of fine jewelry on display.
The hat once belonged to Nick Saban.
