This is not a time for sentiment.

LSU plays McNeese State on Saturday

The Tigers will be facing a team quarterbacked by head coach Ed Orgeron’s son Cody and coached by Frank Wilson, a former co-worker of Orgeron’s on the LSU staff.

This game was scheduled as an opportunity for the Cowboys to make some bucks and maybe gain a little prestige while the Tigers got some useful sparring with the start of SEC play looming.

Along the way the younger Orgeron could show his dad how well he was progressing, and Wilson, one of the country’s top recruiters of the New Orleans area, could demonstrate that he was maintaining McNeese as a solid FCS program.

It would be a nice friendly, get-together between the guys from Lake Charles, which is still recovering from devastating hurricane damage done primarily but not exclusively by Laura, and the guys from Baton Rouge, which largely dodged a bullet with Hurricane Ida last week.

But things have changed.

Suddenly LSU has a greater sense of urgency about this game. The Tigers were thoroughly beaten, according to Orgeron, by UCLA (38-27) in their opener, essentially wiping out all preseason optimism.

So LSU desperately needs an impressive bounce-back performance against Cody, Frank and the rest of the Cowboys.

The Tigers need to harass the younger Orgeron a heck of a lot better than they did UCLA quarterback Dorian Thompson-Robinson.

They need to dominate Wilson’s Cowboys with their running game, set up Max Johnson for a big passing game and smother McNeese’s offense. In other words, LSU needs to do to McNeese what UCLA did to LSU.

Of course nothing the Tigers do this Saturday will negate or change what happened last Saturday.

But a dominant performance against the outmanned Cowboys, who lost their opener to West Florida 42-36, can edit the emerging narrative on this fledgling season.

The narrative is forming with the possibility that LSU isn’t any better than it was as a 5-5 team a year ago, that all those highly touted, fresh-faced new assistant coaches are different but no better than their grizzled predecessors, that Orgeron and his staff don’t know how to mold a team that performs at a level at least equal to the cumulative talent level that has been recruited.

Orgeron is never more than one poor Tigers performance from facing the ire of a significant portion of the LSU fan base.

A lot of LSU fans didn’t want Orgeron to get this job after the 2016 season. Many warily accepted his hire. Some were temporarily won over by the 2019 CFP championship, but needed just 10 games – or fewer – to no longer be won over.

This Tigers team has 11 games left in this season. The game against McNeese is followed by another presumed tune-up against Central Michigan in Tiger Stadium before the SEC opener arrives Sept. 25 at Mississippi State.

But in some quarters, this season already is one in crisis.

Wolves are surrounding the state-of-the-art LSU football operations facility sometimes affectionately called “The Ponderosa,” barking for Orgeron’s head already.

The coach has got a lot of work to do over the next few months if he’s going to disperse them. But on Saturday he might be able to at least bark out his own authoritative “sit” command and get them to calm down long enough to pause and keep a slightly open mind on this team at least until SEC play begins.

Sorry, Cody, Sorry, Frank. Sorry, McNeese.

You picked a bad time to make that 2-hour bus ride east. Or perhaps more accurately, LSU picked a bad time for you.

After the debacle in the Rose Bowl, Orgeron and his Tigers no longer need a friendly sparring partner.

They need someone to knock out.