Saturday’s game in New Orleans was the
ugliest of the Les Miles era – the first half, anyway. It is hard to find words
to describe the first 30 minutes of football against the Green Wave … words that
are decent enough to be printed here.
It doesn’t matter now. As of 3 p.m.
Sunday afternoon, the Tigers are ranked No. 1 in the land.
Despite a penalty-riddled first
half and a one-point, 10-9 halftime advantage over lowly Tulane, LSU gathered
itself in the second half, scoring 24second-half points and rolling to a 34-9
win over a surprisingly pesky Green Wave team in the Louisiana
Superdome.
While there were more than a few
concerns voiced in the wake of Saturday afternoon’s sleepwalk in the Big Easy,
it could have been much, much worse.
Just ask anyone around the country,
most notably in Gainesville, Norman, Morgantown and
Austin, and they’ll let you know what misery
truly is this sunny Sunday afternoon in Baton Rouge.
Saturday was one of those wild,
wacky days that make college football the greatest game on Earth. Three top-five
teams, seven of the top 13, and nine ranked opponents all went down in flames
over the weekend.
Third-ranked Oklahoma was stunned in Boulder when unranked Colorado, who trailed 24-7 at one point,
rallied to win 27-24. No. 4 Florida lost to unranked Auburn 20-17 in Gainesville on a
last-second field goal. No. 5 West Virginia got the upset-fest going on Friday
night with a 21-13 loss to surging South
Florida.
Seventh-ranked Texas had been living on borrowed time for weeks, and the
clock finally struck midnight when unranked Kansas State
laid the wood to the Horns in Austin, 41-21. No. 10 Rutgers fell from grace
with a 34-24 loss to Maryland, while No. 11
Oregon nearly pulled off an upset of sixth-ranked Cal. No. 13 Clemson fell flat in a loss to
Georgia Tech, while Penn State and Alabama both lost to fall out of the
poll.
How does all of this affect LSU?
Five top-10 teams lost for the
first time since 2003. Ironically that year, those five losses helped propel LSU
from No. 8 to third in the poll and inevitably thrust the Tigers into the
serious side of the national championship debate.
LSU has been a fixture in that
debate this season with several other teams, but Saturday’s free-for-all served
as a clearinghouse for the “who’s really the best team” debate. The Tigers’ ugly
win over Tulane, coupled with USC’s mistake-ridden 27-24 win at Washington, allowed LSU
to nudge out the Trojans for the top spot in the AP poll.
LSU earned 1,593 points compared to
1,591 by USC. The Tigers picked up 33 first-place votes, offset by the Trojans’
32. It is the first time since 1959 that an LSU team finds itself at the top of
the AP poll and the first time the Tigers have been ranked in the nation’s top
spot during the regular season since that year as well.
It seems strange that the Tigers
ascend to No. 1 this week – especially after they played so poorly against the
Green Wave. LSU owns two previous victories this season over top-12 teams and
neither were enough to boost the Tigers to the top spot.
Yet a 25-point win over a team LSU
should have pummeled proved to be enough to get the job done. One e-mail I
received on Sunday stated “No. 1 after that? The voters must really watch
‘SportsCenter.’”
I tend to agree.
Yes, LSU trailed at one point in
the game. Things got a bit tense as hundreds of Tulane fans waved their green
pom-poms in the air. Do not misinterpret this, however; never was the game truly
in doubt. The Tigers continued shooting themselves in the foot time and again
with penalties, turnovers, and one mental lapse after another.
They did recover, though, and in
the second half looked much more like the team that dominated throughout the
first four games and dismissed the Green Wave.
Prior to Saturday’s game, the Ole Miss game a year ago was by far the worst performance of the Miles era. But that
at least came against an SEC team and not a cellar-dweller from Conference
USA that beat Southeastern Louisiana by seven points a week
earlier.
Another piece of irony from this
game is that an 11 a.m. kickoff probably saved LSU from national humiliation and
allowed the Tigers to leapfrog the Trojans. While LSU fans hate the morning
kickoff, if the Tigers had laid that first-half egg and trailed Tulane during
prime time, it is likely LSU would have fallen in the polls … well, if the rest
of the top five didn’t lose.
The voters were still sipping their
coffee, reading Saturday’s paper and marveling over West Virginia’s Friday
night loss while LSU was doing its first-half scramble on the floor of the
Superdome. Sure, word got out during the day that the No. 2 Tigers actually
trailed the lowly Green Wave in the first half. But with the events of a wild
Saturday and USC’s nationally televised struggles with Washington, by the time
Kirk Herbstreit announced LSU as his No. 1 team at roughly 12 a.m. EDT, the
Tigers were a lock for the top spot.
Welcome back, No. 1 LSU. It’s been
a while.
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Matt Deville is the editor of Tiger
Rag. Reach him at matt@tigerrag.com.