LSU vs. Wisconsin

What are your thoughts fellas and ladies?

As a Flagshipper I'll root against both. Would love for Barry to get his arse handed to him by an SEC team to teach him a lesson about his hubris. At the same time, would love for Bert's players to whip an SEC team, just a bonus that it'd be LSU. Neither outcome is exactly great for hog fans and I think it'll be an interesting game.

LSU has question marks with all of the talent they've lost the last couple years, but they've recruited extremely well and they seem to be able to just replace what they lose. However, unexperienced QB's haven't set the world on fire during the Miles era at LSU, but Cam Cameron wasn't on staff either in 2008.

Wisconsin loses a ton of seniors on defense and their best offensive weapons graduated as well. They do have RS-JR Joel Stave at QB, another 2star that Bert helped develop into a serviceable D1 player, he had a pretty decent year last season. He completed 62% of his passes for almost 2500 yards with 22TD and 13 INT.

Melvin Gordon will be the feature back, he rushed for over 1600 yards and 12TD and averaged 7.8 yds/attempt last season. Corey Clement should see the ball quite a bit too.

I don't know much about their WR/TE corps but Kenzel Doe is their lone Sr. WR, he's only started 1 game in 3 years. Jared Abbredewhatev had over 1,000 yards last season. Gary Andersen's teams at Utah St. were pretty balanced

Wisconsin still has Bielema's huge OL and most of the OL recruits were guys Bielema had locked up before he left. They're still huge, strong, and nasty. It'll be interesting to see who wins the trenches.

Defensively, Wisky was a top 20 squad last year but they lose 7 senior starters. We'll see how Andersen can replace them. We tried to get Sojourn Shelton to flip to us after Bielema took our job, but he stayed committed to Wisconsin and started 11 games as a true frosh at CB. He would have started at Arkansas too.

The front 7 is where all the graduating starters played, so the secondary should have a good amount of experience and I'd expect LSU to test the new DL and LB of Wisconsin by running right at them to start the game and see how soft the belly of that defense is. If Wisconsin's D can bottle up LSU's run game and force the young LSU QB's to win the game through the air, Wisconsin may be able to sustain long drives with their own running game and short passing game to panic Miles and his young team into making mistakes and this could be a great night for melts on Tiger Rant.

If Fournette and Hilliard have a field day pounding the ball at will, Wisconsin will have to stack the box and I wouldn't be shocked to see some deep bombs over the top for a runaway game by LSU.

I think it's an intriguing game that will show us what LSU is all about this year, and could give us a glimpse if the Bielema system has any shot of working at Arkansas like we think it will.