I’ve said all I care to about the LSU / Troy game, but I will note my prediction was 42 - 20. So Troy made it closer than I thought, and obviously things unfolded not like I expected - or as they should have. And it was a different defensive back that scored on Jarrett Lee’s latest gift, not the guy I was expecting it to be.
Elsewhere in the SEC:
Florida’s blowout of South Carolina was really impressive. I looked for more defense from the Cocks and a closer game. But it was South Carolina making the mistakes as I figured. I just thought they could keep things closer.
The surprise in the Georgia / Auburn game was the Dawgs’ ineffective offense. Just 28 more yards and three fewer points than UT-Martin put on the War Eagles? Oof.
Alabama took care of Mississippi State as expected.
Kentucky couldn’t keep the Randall “Not Tex” Cobb momentum going and lost to Vandy. I’d expected more and blew the pick. And it did not escape my notice that the ‘Cats put up 90 more yards and 14 more points on Georgia than they did on Vandy.
And then we have Ole Miss, who dropped 520 yards and 59 points on UL-Monroe while holding the Warhawks scoreless and with just 131 yards of offense. UL-M rang up 341 yards and 27 points on Arkansas earlier this year. That performance is quite noteworthy with the Rebels visiting Baton Rouge Saturday.
OK, so the last bit I feel compelled to add about the “historic” LSU comeback against Troy is how the Tigers managed to come back from 28 down in the middle of the third quarter. The comeback was remarkable in how unremarkable LSU’s offense was in making it happen.
Yes, Jarrett Lee made some good throws. He also made some bad ones during the comeback. Pretty typical (minus another interception). And Jordan Jefferson delivered a touchdown scramble on fourth down for the Tigers’ first touchdown. But there was really nothing special about the drives - it’s really just what you would have expected the Tigers to do all game against Troy.
The comeback started with 6:24 left in the third. And down 28, LSU consumed 4:58 on their first touchdown drive. The lack of a sense of urgency was remarkable. Either the Tiger coaches felt confident that they had shut Troy down and would get plenty of possessions in the fourth and lots of time to score or they figured the game was lost.
After Jefferson’s run to bring the game to 31-10, Troy managed to run all of 1:08 on their next possession. Lee then engineered his one really good drive (4-for4 with long completions to Tolliver and LaFell) as the Tigers went 86 yards in 1:18. Without that drive, I think the game is done. But Lee came through. Remember, of course, this was Troy - but I give him credit for not folding at that point.
Troy’s next possession lasted all of 1:06 and LSU got the ball back on their own 40. Another four (safe) completions by Lee, a facemask penalty by Troy and a Charles Scott blast near the goalline brought things to 31 - 24 with 10:33 left.
And 58 seconds later, LSU has the ball on Troy’s 13 after Chad Jones’ interception. The Tigers ran off 1:41 before Colt David’s field goal brought things to 31 - 27 with 7:51 left.
On its next possession, Troy ate up a whopping 35 seconds before punting back to LSU. Despite starting from mid-field, Lee couldn’t move the Tigers, and LSU went three-and-out. Of course, Troy touched the punt, giving LSU the ball back at the Troy 21 with 6:26 left. Two screen passes and a good throw to Tolliver got LSU to the 4, and Scott punched it in. The Tigers went ahead with 4:50 left.
And it was all over after that. Troy squandered its chance to get into field goal range, and LSU scored again to finish things out at 40 - 31.
But a couple of things can’t be overlooked. First is that LSU simply ran its regular offense and scored on six of its final seven drives. That should be expected against Troy - it was only remarkable because LSU failed to execute its offense so badly for the first 39 minutes of the game. But, more significantly, Troy absolutely threw the game away with horrible clock management. Up by 17 with 16:26 remaining in the game, the Trojans held the ball an average of 56 seconds on their next four possessions and gained an average of 3.75 yards on each drive.
Notwithstanding the fact that Troy gave up an interception and a punt muff to help the Tigers out, the horrible time management spelled doom for Troy. Running the ball into the line three times on each of those four drives would have eaten up somewhere around nine minutes and likely would have gained more than 15 yards. Instead, Troy consumed less than four minutes and gave LSU a short field with the interception.
Those extra six minutes gave LSU the luxury of time they should not have had. Beyond that, it was play like you should have been playing - easy deal.
The Advocate (the Baton Rouge daily, not the national gay newspaper) this morning is filled with tales of heroism and references to the “epic” game played in Tiger Stadium yesterday. As any reader of that paper knows, homerism is to be expected. The softness with which they treat Jarrett Lee has become familiar - praising the hell out of his good throws, making excuses for the interceptions they find fault of others in and glossing over the truly horrendous mistakes of Lee.
But what’s bothering me more this morning is this notion published in The Advocate and generally spreading online of “‘D’ shines, but Tigers still fail“. Maybe it’s a reflection of LSU’s diminished expectations on defense, but I would hardly call giving up 353 yards to a team that averages 369 “shining”.
Yes, it was very good to see LSU’s defense not collapse this week and give up ridiculous scores (thanks, in large part, to Earl Alexander basically handing the ball to Chad Jones at the one-yard line and John Parker Wilson’s touchdown scramble being called back for holding), and nine of 12 Bama drives ending in either punts or turnovers means the defense did its job.
Look, though, deeper into this season and you can see how LSU’s defensive performance against the Tide was completely average. In SEC play, Bama was held to fewer rushing yards than LSU allowed (138) by both Ole Miss and Georgia, and fewer passing yards (215) by Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Ole Miss held Bama to 326 total yards and 24 points - better than LSU in yards and just one of Bama’s two missed/blocked field goals worse in points.
Had the LSU defense truly “shined” and completely shut down Bama’s offense - like Tulane did (172 total yards, 20 points allowed) - the Tigers would have been in a better position to overcome Jarrett Lee. But they were just average. Given LSU’s performances against Florida and Georgia, average was very good to see. It just wasn’t enough.
In all but one extremely obvious way (I’ll give you a hint - it wears number 12), LSU is a better team than Alabama. I thought that going in to today’s game, and the results showed it. For all of Jarrett Lee’s gifts to Alabama, the Tigers still managed to take this one to overtime.
Of course, Lee had to play in overtime as well, and thus Alabama wins.
There’s no need to make a case for how bad Lee is. Tossing interceptions 11 through 14 on a night he completed 38% of his passes speaks for itself. He is and has to be the Tigers’ main quarterback, but no Jordan Jefferson - at all? After Lee goes 4 for 15 with two interceptions in the first half - no looks for Jefferson … at all?
Leslie got a bit indignant with Tracy Wolfson when she asked about Jefferson during the halftime interview, saying something along the lines of there being “talk” of that, but he didn’t know that he would play him (I’ll look for a clip of that). What might that “talk” have been? Well, it was Leslie on Monday saying as much:
In Leslie Coachspeak, “that game” means the previous one (Tulane) and “this game” means the upcoming one (Alabama).
So where was Jefferson? Maybe something happened during the week that precluded Leslie from playing him, but it surely was called for and I’ll be interested to see how Miles explains away his absence.
UPDATE: From his post-game news conference - Leslie seems to contradict his Monday statement that he planned to play Jefferson:
OK, so … coach, you’re confusing me. Something go wrong at practice? It would help boost the confidence of the people listening to you if you didn’t so obviously contradict yourself without some explanation of why things changed. And Baton Rouge media - awesome job not asking why he told you on Monday that he expected Jefferson to play and then acted tonight like it would be ridiculous to do so.
Obviously Lee was a huge liability in this game. And like in the Georgia game, subtract the negative impact of Jarrett Lee and LSU likely wins the game. But the Georgia game (like the Florida game, which we would have lost no matter what) was just comically blown by Lee. The Tigers were never in the Florida game and were out of it early in the second half against Georgia.
This one was different. Despite all of the mistakes, LSU stayed in the game. The Tigers beat Bama’s run defense bad - putting up 153 yards in the first half against a team that came in giving up 65 a game. And somehow Lee managed a solid drive in the fourth quarter to tie the game. The third quarter was an offensive wasteland.
Again, why there was no Jordan Jefferson for a second-half change of pace - especially considering LSU ran a couple of direct-snap plays for Richard Murphy and showed they could beat Bama’s run defense - is just baffling.
The defense didn’t play great, giving the Tide 14 yards less than their 369-per-game average (and just three yards less than Arkansas State gave them last week), but it was manageable. Two drives resulted in touchdowns (if you can call a zero-yard drive after an interception a drive), two resulted in turnovers, two resulted in missed/blocked field goals and seven resulted in punts. LSU’s defense did well enough - unless your quarterback is Jarrett Lee.
This was an extremely frustrating loss. We should have beaten the No. 1 team in the country that is a longtime heated rival now led by our former coach … and despite ourselves, we almost did. It’s easy to lay the blame on the guy who threw four interceptions including the suicide pass into double-coverage in overtime, and I do blame him.
But I want to know what the hell Leslie and the coaching staff were thinking. Why was there no Jefferson? Why do you give Lee enough rope to hang himself in overtime? From the outside view, it just looked like Miles had decided he was going to live or die by Lee. In the global sense, that’s the way it has to be this year, but I would expect much better situational management of a game. Maybe not from Miles, though.
A proper recap of the week shall follow, but let me just say - thank you Jarrett Lee and Andrew Hatch. I say thanks because you are not Chris Todd and Kodi Burns.
LSU could have been left without a competent quarterback this season, and Auburn demonstrated very well yesterday what that would mean.
Gary Crowton greeting his quarterbacks after Saturday’s win over Auburn:
Assuming Andrew Hatch was, in fact, aware of his own existence again by this point, he’s got the unmistakable look of the guy who just realized that hot girl in the bar is actually after his friend, not him.
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