The "Largest blown lead" thread on tRant.

According to the topic, LSU's largest blown lead in the last 11 years of football was 16 points to us in 2008. Meanwhile, we've somehow blown seven 17-point leads in the same timespan, and somehow lost 24-35 against Virginia Tech when we were up 24-0. That got me to thinking; that's an interesting and impressive stat. As much as LSU fans complained about Les Miles' offense, coordinator hires, and clock management, how far back do I have to go to find Arkansas-levels of incompetence with losing games that were well in hand?

I went back to the beginning of the BCS, and the only time LSU ever lost a game they were up by three scores was against Tennessee in 2005, when they went to halftime up 21-0. I was going to go further back to the '92 expansion, but I got to '94 and started running out of easily Googled data and got bored. As of '94, they still hadn't done it again.

I can recall five of those seven 17-point losses off the top of my head, and they were all blown in the third or fourth quarter. It's not like we jump out to an early fluky lead (like when we went up 14-0 against LSU in 2011) and then the game eventually equalizes. We've dominated and fallen apart consistently ever since JLS.

What causes our football teams to be so predisposed to this? I'm convinced the only way to beat it is to recruit our way out and I'm not entirely sure we can do that. Morris finished last cycle with the best class we've ever signed, but it was looking like it was going to end up in the top 15 and be truly notable, and ended up #20-#23 - barely above status quo. I'm interested to see what he can do going forward. We can talk about his Texas recruiting connections all day, but if he's truly the shite on the trail, he's going to have to at least stop our top talent from leaving the state. At least the ones who aren't transplants.

And honestly, I think outside of skill positions, Texas high school players are overrated with their 7-on-7 football. There's a reason zero out of five P5 Texas schools rarely if ever have a good defense. I really wish Bert's BS Louisiana and Florida "pipelines" turned out to be legit, because I think that's where we'd have built the stout lines he was supposed to have been known for.

It's frustrating to see LSU has basically never had a frickup on the scale of an Arkansas meltdown, the ones we have come to consistently expect even when we've got the game basically won. The perception of our program would be a bit different if we'd stop losing to Rutgers, Colorado State, ULM, and a 4-8 Missouri team when we're up by three scores in the third quarter.