Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

I saw this snippet today from the SEC spring meetings:

Saban’s LSU reunion a lonely ride
Tide coach will be lightning rod for ire

By Ron Higgins
Thursday, May 29, 2008

DESTIN, Fla. — Alabama second-year football coach Nick Saban is a detail-oriented guy.

Just the other day, for instance, Saban was discussing with his coaching staff the itineraries of the 2008 road trips, which include former LSU coach Saban’s first trip back to Baton Rouge on Nov. 8.

“We talk about where we’re staying and who’s going to ride on what bus to the games,” Saban said on Wednesday at the SEC’s spring business meetings. “Somebody on our staff — I’m not going to tell who — said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but when we play LSU, ain’t none of us riding on your bus.’”

Now, Baton Rouge can certainly be a hostile place (which isn’t a good thing, fellow LSU fans) for visiting teams to navigate through; especially the part between the gates of LSU and their locker room. But does anybody who had some great loathing of Fonzie last season for having left LSU for the NFL and then come back to coach Alabama still give a damn?

I mean, we beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa on the way to the national championship and Fonzie managed only a 6-6 regular season and a bowl trip to Shreveport. Then Leslie spurned his beloved alma mater (they say) to stay at LSU because he digs us so much.

I doubt most Tigers fans will ever fall back in love with Saban, but who’s still holding so much hate? If you are, just let it go.

It”s unclear whether Les Miles will even suit Ryan Perrilloux up for the Alabama game Saturday [Perrilloux will not make trip to Tuscaloosa], but it”s clear that after whatever went down at The Varsity (the Baton Rouge live music venue, not the famous Atlanta drive-in) last Thursday, Ryan is once again in Leslie”s dog house. Never-used freshman linebacker Derrick Odom was charged with a misdemeanor and dismissed from the team, but no charges have or likely will come against Perrilloux. Odom was apparently captured on video - along with two others who have not been identified - coming back to The Varsity after hours, faces covered, trying to get into the place and ultimately smashing the window of an SUV. Derrick, I hope you enjoy junior college.

But the Perrilloux situation is much murkier and odd. It”s been reported that Perrilloux called his lawyer early Friday morning about the Varsity fight that started a string of allegations, so he was probably at the club and somehow involved in the fight. Almost 24 hours later, a Varsity employee told police that Perrilloux had pointed a gun at him, but later decided to drop the issue and said he could not pick Perrilloux out of a photo lineup.

See if you can:

Now, I know TV camera men have a hard time telling Perrilloux apart from Kelvin Sheppard when they”re both standing on the sideline wearing No. 11, but you”d think somebody who says “Ryan Perrilloux pointed a gun at me” would be able to identify Ryan Perrilloux in a photo. Obviously that situation smells of a Varsity employee who was making things up or an attempt to not have The Varsity / Chimes associated with the ultimate demise of Ryan Perrilloux (they do a fair business on game weekends, you know).

So Perrilloux may have done nothing worse than being out at The Varsity late on a Thursday night during LSU”s off week and being with guys who got in a fight. Yet Les Miles seems to have banished Perrilloux once again, not referring to him by name when discussing the quarterback situation this week and holding him out of practice all week and announcing today he won”t play Saturday because he”s missed practice.

Is that fair? Probably not. But Perrilloux has once again made himself a distraction for the Tigers, so he”s lost the benefit of the doubt. LSU players say their coaches constantly reinforce the idea that football players are targets and to always be aware of where you are, what you”re doing and who you”re with. For a guy like Perrilloux - poised to be the starter next year, likely to have a shot at the NFL and carrying the weight of two prior off-field problems - the best idea is to just avoid situations like he found himself in Thursday night. And for God”s sake, if a fight breaks out, walk the other way. Explain to your boys that you”ll give them $100,000 when you sign your NFL deal instead of getting their back right now.

I wouldn”t look for Perrilloux to get much more than mop-up duty the rest of the season. Would Leslie”s attitude be different if Matt Flynn”s ankle were still gimpy? Maybe so, but the fact of the matter is Perrilloux isn”t a big part of LSU”s offense, so it”s an easy choice for Miles to make.

I”ve been a proponent of more Perrilloux playing time, but Miles and Gary Crowton haven”t exactly structured the gameplan around him seeing a lot of action. I can”t find the stats for total snaps played, but his game-by-game pass attempts / rush totals look like this:

Mississippi State: 6
Virginia Tech: 9
MTSU: 33 (Flynn injured)
South Carolina: 9
Tulane: 5

Florida: 7
Kentucky: 7
Auburn: 5

Even with Flynn”s injury and Perrilloux”s 298-yard night against MTSU, it”s clear the trend is not toward a deeper involvement for Perrilloux this season. The Tigers might find themselves in trouble if Flynn goes down (the other alternatives being the guy from Harvard who”s not in the media guy and taking the redshirt off of Jarrett Lee), but Miles clearly believes he can win with Flynn and Perrilloux”s poor judgment will quiet the calls to get him into the games more often.

Only time will tell the fate of Ryan Perrilloux. Will he finally heed the advice of his coaches and just stay home at night? Will he continue to be in the wrong places and find himself off the team? Will he end up in Mike”s cage threatening tiger-cide late one night? We shall see.

But for the rest of 2007, don”t expect to see No. 11 on the field much - except on kicks, and that”ll be Kelvin Sheppard.

He was a good fella. And could somebody at LSU please come up with a picture from his arrival day in the cage that includes me? Dude on the right sort of almost looks like me, but it ain”t.

The symbolism of Mike V dying as the LSU Baseball team”s season likely gets put to rest in Nashville this weekend is not lost on me. Dark Days, indeed.

These are not good times for LSU fans. We”re not even 90 days removed from the last great moment in Tiger sports - the thrashing of Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl - and good news is rare in South Baton Rouge. Men”s basketball wasn”t even invited to the NIT a year after reaching the Final Four. Women”s hoops opens the NCAA tourney today under the weight of Pokey Chatman”s sex-scandal resignation. Baseball began SEC play yesterday - getting shut out by South Carolina - unranked and having dropped series to the powerhouse programs that are Stetson and Lipscomb.

And the man in the middle - Skip Bertman - is under fire for his handling of the Pokey situation, the state of the baseball program and increasingly his general management of the athletic department. Sure, all those new buildings and Tiger Stadium expansions are nice, but Tiger fans aren”t really happy with the old baseball coach, who”ll be stepping aside no more than a year from this summer. Especially in the wake of the sex scandal, more pressure may be put on Bertman to go ahead and retire when his current contract ends June 30.

Given the problems with hoops and baseball, the shining light of LSU sports is clearly football. And the brightest light in the program is about to be an Oakland Raider.

To say the 2007 football season is important for LSU sports is like saying Jessica Simpson”s tits are important to her career. Obvious and a huge understatement.

The expectations for Leslie are huge. LSU may start the season ranked higher than any year since 1959, when we debuted at No. 1 coming off our first national championship (we started at No. 4 in 2004 and No. 5 in 2005). The schedule - so brutal in 2006 - favors LSU, with South Carolina, Florida, Auburn and Arkansas all coming to Baton Rouge (along with Virginia Tech), and the clear expectation is an SEC West title and another shot at the BCS.

Really rabid Tiger fans expect nothing less than another national championship this season, but the sane among us realize the BCS is too much of a crap shoot to project any team into the title game before late November (unless you”re talking about USC, of course). SEC teams shoot for no more than one loss - to a good team - a division title and an SEC Championship Game win. How things fall beyond that are in the hands of the football gods.

That”s Leslie”s expectation this year. Stay in the top 5 and win the west. And, by the way, you”d better beat Fonzie in Tuscaloosa to satisfy the Saban=Satan crowd.

Of course, there will be no JaMarcus Russell this year; no Dwayne Bowe; no LaRon Landry and no Jessie Daniels. The staff, like the players, is less Saban-influenced and the program clearly will carry Miles” mark from here on. This is the season Leslie shows his worth - the influence and the expectations are all his now.

With so much of the LSU sports program in disarray, football success is critical. Big wins in Tiger Stadium do wonders to take attention away from problems elsewhere. And when football is down, there needs to be success elsewhere to keep LSU hope alive (see LSU Baseball: 1989 - 2000). With football expectations so high and problems elsewhere so troubling, the importance of football success is magnified even more.

LSU football is on the brink of “elite” status. Winning the SEC and getting back to the BCS this year would get us there. Faltering and winding up 8-4 or worse would just toss another log on the fire of LSU”s athletic woes.

I”ll be rooting hard for Leslie this fall.

I hit the LSU page of The Advocate (the Baton Rouge daily, not the national gay newspaper) tonight to catch the post-game Tennessee / pre-game Alabama coverage, and lo and behold … The Advocate has a (not at all gay) new design.

Check it: Advocate redesign. OK, it”s not spectacular. White background - what a concept. I”m not going to nitpick … still no linking of the big-assed logo to the front page? trying to compete with ajc.com for the most links you can put on a page? … but one thing really sets me off.

The Advocate has launched a pretty full set of RSS feeds, but apparently the Manship family still doesn”t quite grasp the concept. Understandable in a place like Baton Rouge, I guess, but here”s a tip:

RSS is not a means to shove out headlines with no content attached. Giving me a feed that says “LSU defense comes up big” but has no snippet of the story is not syndication. It”s closer to spam. The proper form for such a bit of RSS would be:

——————–
LSU defense comes up big
LSU defensive coordinator Bo Pelini shook his head and said it seemed like the Tigers gave up 100 points Saturday. In reality, the best passing game to face LSU this season wasn’t good enough, as the Tigers rallied to beat Tennessee 28-24.
——————–

That”s syndication. Give me a little bit of content (the lead) to see in my RSS environment and if it”s compelling, I”ll click over and read the full story on The Advocate website. If I”m not compelled by what I see in RSS, I”m not clicking over. Sure, I”m probably going to click on “LSU defense comes up big” because of my interest in the Tigers, but “Police and fire briefs for Nov. 6″ isn”t bringing me over.

I suspect this is typical newspaper thinking: “My God, we can”t give away the content!!!”. It”s not surprising that an old-school organization like The Advocate would come to understand “we need RSS” without really understanding the use case behind it.

That”s unfortunate, and hopefully they”ll catch on someday.

As Baton Rouge leaders work on a set of rules for local parades aimed at fostering public safety and welfare, I”d like to relate my experience as a participant in the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade.

The year was 1985. I was working at a little crawfish boiling, poboy making, snoball shaving, pig lip selling, gas pumping convenience store called Country Corner, and we were a fun-loving bunch. Most of the guys who worked there were LSU students from New Orleans who had a connection to the Yat that owned the place. I”d managed to get on there through a neighborhood connection, and by “85 (high school senior year) a very good friend of mine - who shall remain nameless in this piece for the sake of his now-important reputation - had joined me in the crawfish / poboy / snoball / lip / gas industry.

Our store”s manager - also a friend of the head Yat - thought it would be fun and smart to enter a Country Corner “float” in the Spanish Town parade. The theme that year was the Olympics (hey, just a year late) and our master creation was called “Crawfish Goes To The Olympics”. The “float” consisted of the store”s Ford F-150 pickup with a couple of plywood crawfish claws tacked on over the cab. Our gimmick? Instead of beads and doubloons, we”d be giving out fresh boiled crawfish. Seriously.

The back of the pickup had enough room for a garbage can full of crawfish, a keg and about five people. We put about 10 guys back there. Somehow driving duties fell to me.

We set up at the staging area in front of the state capitol about an hour before the parade started, which if I recall was about 10 in the morning. We tapped the keg, busted out the ever-present Country Corner bag-o-pot and waited around for things to get rolling.

As the driver, I didn”t have ready access to the keg … so I brought a 32-ounce cup. I loaded up heavily before the parade and would bang the cup on the top of the cab for more when I”d run dry on the route.

Driving at 3 mph ain”t hard no matter how much you drink; it”s stopping 1,000 times along the route that gets tough. Several times I stopped short and sent the whole crew in the back up into the cab window.

And back behind me, things got out of hand pretty quickly. The original idea for the crawfish was to put three of them into a baggie and hand the baggies out to people next to the truck. But not long into the parade, that strategy was abandoned in favor of tossing individual crawfish into the crowd. Cups of beer were handed out, cute girls were encouraged to drink directly from the tap and more than one parade goer enjoyed some of the gang”s special herbal refreshment.

The crowds around (and on) the truck were thick during the whole parade, and I”m still not sure how nobody ended up underneath it.

We didn”t win any prizes, but Crawfish Goes To The Olympics was a crowd favorite, to say the least.

After the parade was over, we stopped off somewhere (I seem to remember a grassy knoll) to rest up and get drunker/higher before driving the 2-3 miles back to Country Corner - because some of us had to go to work.

But nobody got hurt … unlike another incident that spring involving alcohol, pot (allegedly), a young man”s torso and the white-hot side of a gigantic crawfish pot.

I”d like to say Baton Rouge is over-reacting and parades don”t need no rules. But I know better.