Hello, bus. Meet coordinator. Feel free to run him over. Head coach’s approval.

Who says a lame-duck season can’t be fun? Suddenly it’s open season on scapegoats.

Ed Orgeron never had much of a filter. Maybe too blunt for his own good sometimes. But it was always refreshing.

Now it’s almost unprecedented.

Sometimes he sounds like a know-it-all fan from the upper deck phoning in to a postgame radio talk show.

Except that he probably does know it all.

And, unshackled, he’s not holding back.

A mega-upset of Alabama and mild upset of Arkansas were right there for the LSU offense’s taking the last two weeks.

We’ll take the next caller, this one from the head coach’s office.

Not really, but straight from his weekly news briefing.

“Offense, same old stuff,” Orgeron observed after watching the film of Saturday’s 16-13 loss to Arkansas.

“We’ve got to put our players in better positions. We’re going to call better plays. Same old story … some of our players were frustrated after the game (and) I don’t blame them.

“We got to score (with more) explosive plays. We got to beat contested plays. We’ve got to be able to … be more creative to get our guys open.”

It was a familiar, laundry-list refrain from Orgeron this season, except that this time, while still careful to take the ultimate blame, he teetered right up to the edge of naming names and blaming faces.

Keep in mind, the head coaching model for the Orgeron Era was always to surround his Cajun charisma and recruiting go-get-em with rock star coordinators and let them work their magic.

So, at its base, when the coordinators fail, it’s Orgeron’s failure for hiring them.

This year they got him fired.

When he struck gold in 2019 with young unknown “passing game” coordinator Joe Brady — with adult supervision from offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger — a Heisman Trophy winner was paired with a perfect attack and it was one of the dangdest fireworks shows college football has ever seen.

Otherwise, it’s been hit and mostly miss for Orgeron’s key hires.

Last year it was the disaster of Bo Pelini as defensive coordinator when Orgeron finally had to replace Dave Aranda, whom he inherited from the previous staff.

Early in this season, both coordinator hires — three if you count if you count D.J. Mangas as offensive coordinator Jake Peetz’s “passing game” sidekick — it looked like two hot messes simmering in a dumpster fire.

But defensive coordinator Daronte Jones made steady progress with his side of the ball, getting better as the season went on, remarkably, with as many as nine starters lost to injury.

The offense still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.

See HOBBS, B3 Continued from B1

Peetz, who was one of those offensive assistant thingies on LSU’s undefeated 2019 national championship team, and Mangas both did a hitch with Brady after the original whiz kid left for the NFL’s Carolina Panthers.

In fact, it was Brady’s recommendation that convinced Orgeron to hire them.

Two swings, two misses, apparently.

Orgeron all but admitted it’s not working out. Maybe there’s only so many Joe Bradys that can fall in your lap.

“I knew it’d be a learning curve,” Orgeron said of the changes. “It is a learning curve. Was it a mistake? I won’t say it was a mistake. But they need to do a better job and they know that.”

Orgeron gave them credit for working hard, being the first one in the office, that sort of thing.

“I just think that their experience level may not have been what we needed for that job,” he finally said.

Then it was time to warm up the bus.

“Somebody’s going to write that I put somebody underneath the bus, whatever they call that,” Orgeron said.

He should know that the accepted term is to “throw” somebody under the bus,” but it’s not the first time the translation was garbled.

Anyway, he continued, “There ain’t no bus over there where I live. I just tell the truth. And that’s the truth. We should’ve put them in a better position.”

On the way out, he laughed and added, “You can say that when you’re a lame-duck coach.”

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com