This season hasn’t gone as well as LSU had hoped it would.

A second consecutive national championship was never a realistic possibility. Neither was another SEC championship.

Too many players from last year’s team entered left for the NFL after last season. A few more opted out closer to the start of the season.

A lot of inexperienced players were going to start. This team was going to go through some growing pains.

But it has been even worse than those considerations suggested it was likely to be.

The Tigers are 3-5 after Saturday’s blowout loss to Alabama.

Here are 5 blunders coaches have made that contributed to a disappointing season.

1. The defensive plan against Mississippi State

LSU began the season with a new defensive coordinator (Bo Pelini) and a new defensive scheme (4-3).

It had an almost entirely new starting lineup from last season and lost its best player (Derek Stingley Jr.) to illness less than 24 hours before kickoff.

Pelini decided to defend State coach Mike Leach’s pass-happy “Air Raid” attack with tight man-to-man coverage rather than softer man-to-man coverage or zone coverage that would have put less pressure on the young DBs.

It failed badly. Players were confused. Receivers ran uncovered. DBs missed tackles.

The plan was terrible in the first quarter, and the second, and the third, and the fourth. But Pelini stuck with it. He never adjusted a failed strategy.

The Bulldogs set an SEC record with 623 passing yards and threw 6 touchdown passes as they beat the Tigers 44-34.

The season started with LSU losing a game most everyone thought it would win. The young defenders were shell-shocked.

The defense gradually improved until Alabama ripped it to shreds Saturday, but the bad plan and refusal to adjust was a major setback to the psyche of the defense and the team as a whole.

LSU fans have been calling for Pelini’s firing most of the season. Stay tuned.

2. The goal-line play-calling at Missouri

LSU trailed Missouri 45-41 when Myles Brennan drove the Tigers to the 1-yard line in the final minute. They had 4 plays to gain 1 yard, take the lead and almost certainly come away with a victory.

But they didn’t.

They ran Tyrion Davis-Price in the middle of the line and he got stuffed. On 2nd down they tried the same thing and he got stuffed again.

On 3rd down, a Brennan pass was broken up as was his 4th-down pass.

LSU hadn’t run the ball well all day, but offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger put it on the offensive line to win the battle up front on the first 2 plays. They needed a mere yard, but it didn’t work because the line failed to block adequately for the run – just as it had all game.

The first 2 failures gave the Missouri defense confidence and put LSU back on its heels.

On 3rd and 4th down, penetration against the offensive line doomed the pass plays.

Head coach Ed Orgeron didn’t like the play calls on the goal line. He said LSU did a poor job on having its best personnel on the field for the plays that were being called.

It was a meltdown when gaining a single yard could have made a big difference in the early season psyche of the team.

3. Failure to develop a consistent running game

The Tigers are inexperienced at quarterback. Their best offensive weapon (Biletnikoff winner Ja’Marr Chase) opted out before the season.

The passing game wasn’t going to carry this team the way Joe Burrow and the passing game carried last year’s team.

Brennan played quite well before being injured, but LSU mostly paid lip service to the running game, which could have made things easier on all the quarterbacks as well as the defense.

Orgeron said before the season that the running backs were the best position group on the offense, but he and Ensminger still haven’t utilized them as such with any consistency.

The line has had its problems, but throwing the ball more and more isn’t the solution to that. Playing from behind, as LSU often has, makes running ball more difficult, but not running the ball enough early on contributes to playing from behind.

The Tigers took advantage of an outmanned Vanderbilt team, a disintegrating South Carolina team and a COVID-depleted Arkansas defensive front to run the ball very well in the 3 victories.

The determination to run the ball made things easier on the quarterbacks and kept the defense off the field.

It might have made things better in some of the losses, but Orgeron and Ensminger weren’t as committed as they could have been.

4. Indecisive use of the freshman QBs

LSU began the season with one quarterback (Brennan) who had played in a college game.

It hoped he would stay healthy the whole season, but there was always the possibility that a freshman (TJ Finley or Max Johnson) could be thrust into the lineup.

The Tigers didn’t give either freshman a chance to get his feet wet in the blowout against Vanderbilt.

Brennan played through an abdominal injury in the game against Missouri, but it became clear shortly afterward that he would be sidelined for a while.

Orgeron said Finley and Johnson would battle it out in practice to determine who would start. The audition stretched over 2 weeks because the Florida game got postponed.

The coach suggested both players would be utilized against South Carolina, and it could have been useful for both players to get meaningful snaps.

Finley started and played well enough that he kept taking snaps. Finally Johnson got mop-up duty in a 42-24 rout.

When Finley turned the ball over 3 times in the next game against Auburn, Johnson was thrown into a lost cause.

In the 2 games before Alabama, Finley started and did some good stuff and some bad stuff. Johnson periodically has been given an opportunity to provide a spark, which he has been unable to do while games have been competitive.

Orgeron said the plan going into the loss at Texas A&M was to utilize Johnson earlier to include more running plays. It didn’t work.

Had there been a clear vision of how to utilize both quarterbacks, with packages suited to each player’s strengths, neither would have felt the pressure of keeping the team in the game early, both could have focused on plays that best fit their strengths and both could have watched from the sideline and they could have learned from each other.

Nothing was going to change the outcome against Auburn or Alabama. Maybe the outcome at Texas A&M could have been different.

But it seems as though the coaches have been trying to figure it out as they go along rather than crafting a coherent approach weeks ago.

5. Losing too many players

There’s only so much coaches can do to keep players from leaving early for the NFL Draft or amid the COVID-19 pandemic opting out to focus on the draft.

The flip side of early departures is that they create expanded opportunities for the players who stick around.

Several players who were focused not on the NFL but on their college careers chose to leave LSU. Players sometimes think they deserve bigger roles than coaches believe their abilities warrant.

Still, given the poor play of the defense this season it seems the coaches should have been able to find a mutually satisfactory role for at least a couple of the players who entered the transfer portal – Marcel Brooks, Apu Ika, Travez Moore, Justin Thomas, TK McClendon and Nelson Jenkins – that might have prevented the defensive drop-off from being so dramatic.