LSU football: Season will look a lot worse if Tigers lose to Florida
By Les East
Published:
Brian Kelly’s 1st season as LSU football coach has been OK.
So far.
The 1-point loss to Florida State in the opener was frustrating, but not terribly surprising. The Tigers fought back, played better as the game went along and very nearly forced overtime.
They thrashed outmanned opponents in Southern and New Mexico. In between, they used a dominant 2nd half to win 31-16 against a Mississippi State team than has won all of its other games by an average of 24 points.
LSU didn’t play great against an Auburn team in shambles, but it still was dominant in scoring the final 20 points to get an SEC win on the road.
Then came Tennessee last week.
It was Kelly’s 1st game against a ranked team, and LSU wasn’t up to the task, falling behind 20-0 and getting whipped 40-13 at home. It was a bad day at the office for Kelly and his staff, and the Tigers’ personnel shortcomings were glaring.
Still, a 4-2 overall record and a 2-1 SEC record are pretty consistent with preseason expectations.
But things can change in a hurry.
The SEC part of the schedule is just getting rolling.
The Tigers head to The Swamp to face Florida on Saturday. The Gators are in a similar place as LSU — 4-2, 1-2 in the SEC, though they have played 3 games against ranked teams, beaten 1 (Utah) and were far more competitive against Tennessee than LSU was.
If the Tigers win Saturday, they’ll match their SEC win total from last season and be 1 win from bowl eligibility with a nonconference game against UAB looming amid the SEC stretch run.
But if LSU loses, this season could take on a different feel.
The Gators, like the Tigers, are embarking on a new era. The Gators, like the Tigers, entered the season with modest expectations in terms of won-loss record, but also an expectation that improvement from the previous regime will be visible.
A loss by Kelly’s team on Saturday would suggest that Billy Napier’s first Gators team is further along than LSU. And that would be a red flag in Baton Rouge.
Napier’s name was mentioned in the background in some quarters when the Tigers went searching for Ed Orgeron’s replacement.
But LSU AD Scott Woodward was never going to hire Napier. He was going to hire a big name. He wasn’t going to hire a coach from a program that’s not in a Power 5 conference.
He certainly wasn’t going to hire a guy working 50 miles from the LSU campus, guiding a program that Tigers supporters view as a small, weak sibling.
But Napier’s a good coach, he did a fine job at Louisiana-Lafayette and he was impressive enough to land the Florida gig.
Napier is 43 years old; Kelly turns 61 in 2 weeks. If Napier can handle an SEC job, he could be a key player in the conference for 2-3 decades. Kelly’s not going to be coaching that long.
If LSU loses consecutive games for the 1st time this season and Kelly loses to the young rival that his school never took seriously as a candidate, there could be some panic around Baton Rouge.
Next week, LSU will be an underdog at Ole Miss. After an open date, it will be an underdog against Alabama in Tiger Stadium.
After the game against UAB in Tiger Stadium, the season concludes with road games against Arkansas and Texas A&M.
When folks start projecting what’s going to happen in late October and November, a starting point of a 5-2 overall record and a 3-1 SEC record produces much more encouraging prospects than a starting point of 4-3 and 2-2.
Kelly reminded people this week that his program is “right in the middle of a process” and that the coaches and the players are “working hard to get better every single day.”
It will be easier for LSU fans to have faith in Kelly’s process and to believe the hard work is producing satisfactory results if the Tigers beat the Gators.
A loss would create a very different mood.
Les East is a New Orleans-based football writer who covers LSU for SaturdayDownSouth.com. Follow him on Twitter @Les_East.
