LSU: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

What is sad is that this loss may truly herald the end of an era on SECr. It may cause a diminution of the delusion of some of the LSU fan base that have entertained us for years. Imagine a SECr without LSU fan declarations of "eight first round draft picks.. lock," or "Heisman this player" ..., or or "Refs cheated us," or "REC," or even "we almost beat Bama, should have won?" Imagine a SECr LSU fan base that posts like... say ... Vanderbilt fans? The prospect is depressing.

For LSU: The Good; the Bad; the Ugly.

There are a number of facets to LSU’s crushing defeat by MSU.

GOOD:

Nothing – perhaps there was a lesson learned about entitlement and humility to both team and fans.

BAD: It was an epic game in its badness. Every weakness that knowledgeable observers knew existed pre-season were exposed.

Defense - front 7 pushed around like lightweights by a cobbled together MSU OL that had only two starters return from last year. The LBs were shown to be below SEC average; the front 3-4 were weak and played “lite” as they did last year; not to mention zero depth. The secondary showed the youth and inexperience that was feared.

Offense - OL either had a bad game or are as average a group as was feared, both in protection and run blocking. The QB was not a game changer as we knew, but given the failure up front, was just plain pedestrian. The RBs may be powerful, but are slow … could not get to edge, consistently racked up for nothing.

Coaching – In the BYU game I wondered WTF is all that stupid shifting? I get the impression more time in practice was spent learning shifts than learning to block. OT and OGs shifting, shifting back and forth like they were Crawdad high school… this crap wore out the OL by making them constantly run. And then they never seemed to get set and block during the actual play. This may be fine for touch football but it doesn’t work in the SEC. Shift-shift-shift then hand off in two hole? It didn’t fool anybody in the stands so how could it fool anyone on the field? It is bush little league crap.

And the D? What you get when you play a 3-4 one-gap is hyper aggression into certain holes. And if you guess wrong? Guess what...

UGLY:

Coaching failures – did not have team ready, plan was poor, no adjustment. This head coach reminds me of Mike Ditka, Saints, hired essentially by a full press public relations push by Buddy Diliberto. Ditka thought football games were won by bad arse aggression and emotions, not plan and thought. Other teams would look at the Saints alignments and literally laugh when he was coach. Everyone is laughing now at LSU.

Terrible discipline and unity - Is anyone surprised? Reference Wisconsin game last year and the terrible personal foul in the closing moments shown over and over on national TV. Reference the Florida game last year when it was shown the inmates were running the asylum before the game? This failure of unity and discipline has plagued LSU since Perreloux was recruited… but this year it is rampant - and I think it reflects the personality of the head coach. Those third quarter ejections were the result of the only “adjustment” I could see at halftime…a directive to get “more physical.” All it did was blacken the eye of the whole program.
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Quit - The progressive collapse of the effort was in contrast to the unity and motivation of MSU.

Culture - This team has a culture that is me first oriented. I don't know what can change that. It doesn't just hurt performance it hurts every facet including recruiting.

I know many die hard but thoughtful LSU fans who were realistic about this team. But on SECr the crapola that spills over from the Tr causes any questioning to be treated as treason and hate. Perhaps the end of that automatic Taliban-like reaction can be regarded as "good."