Five former LSU Tigers are among the nine people selected for the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame’s Class of 2027, with Leonard Fournette, Henry Thomas, Patrick Peterson, Aaron Hill and Ryan Theriot all earning the call.
The class brings together a heavyweight group from across Louisiana sports, but LSU’s footprint is especially loud here. Peterson, Fournette and Thomas represent football; Hill and Theriot give the Tigers a pair of decorated baseball names.
Peterson’s résumé is the kind that still jumps off the page. Before a 13-year NFL career, he was one of college football’s premier defenders at LSU in 2010, winning both the Bednarik Award and the Thorpe Award and becoming the first LSU player to claim those two honors. In the NFL, he made eight straight Pro Bowls from 2011-18, earned three Associated Press first-team All-Pro selections in 2011, 2013 and 2015, and was voted to the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s All-Decade Team for the 2010s.
Fournette arrived at LSU with the weight of being the consensus No. 1 player in the 2014 recruiting class out of St. Augustine in New Orleans, then backed it up with a dominant sophomore season.
He set school single-season marks with 1,953 rushing yards and 22 touchdowns, and also broke the LSU single-game rushing record with 284 yards on 16 carries in a 38-21 win over Ole Miss. His NFL career ran seven seasons across Jacksonville, Tampa Bay and Buffalo, and he was part of the Buccaneers team that won Super Bowl LV.
Thomas made his name as a disruptive defensive tackle for LSU on the 1988 SEC championship team, then went on to 14 NFL seasons as a force inside. He piled up 93½ career sacks, the fourth-most in NFL history among players listed only at defensive tackle or nose tackle. Thomas made the Pro Bowl in 1991 and 1992, picked up second-team AP All-Pro honors in 1993 after a stretch that included 23 sacks over three seasons with the Minnesota Vikings, and was later named one of the “50 Greatest Vikings” in the franchise’s 50th anniversary season in 2010.
On the baseball side, Hill and Theriot both left their mark in Baton Rouge before building long pro careers. Hill, a California native, played shortstop for LSU from 2001-03, was Freshman All-American in 2001, and earned first-team All-American and SEC player of the year recognition in 2003.
He spent 13 MLB seasons with Toronto, Arizona, Milwaukee, Boston and San Francisco, made the American League All-Star team in 2009, and became the first player in MLB history to win a Silver Slugger in both leagues, doing it with the Blue Jays in 2009 and the D-Backs in 2012. He finished with a .986 career fielding percentage, mostly at second base.
Theriot, a Baton Rouge native from Broadmoor High, played shortstop for LSU from 1999-2001 and was part of Skip Bertman’s final College World Series title in 2000, scoring the walk-off run in LSU’s 6-5 win over Stanford. He was named to the College World Series All-Tournament team and later played eight MLB seasons, batting .281 while splitting time across three infield positions and two outfield spots.
Theriot also collected a World Series ring with St. Louis in 2011 and another championship ring with San Francisco a year later.
The nine-member class also includes two-time Triple Crown-winning jockey Robby Albarado, Northwestern State and Alabama college baseball coach Jim Wells, high school football coach Hank Tierney and Lisa Ingram, the cornerstone of ULM’s 1985 Final Four women’s basketball team.
The Class of 2027 will be enshrined June 24-26 next year in Natchitoches, the Hall of Fame’s home, as part of the 68th Induction Celebration. Ticket information for the three-day event is available at lasportshall.com.
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