Herb

Judging by the score it's not necessarily a bad outcome. Judging by the play on the field, there is some work to do. The often hurled criticism of 'playing down to the level of your opponent' is sometimes an outcome of film study where teams calibrate themselves to the level of play of their opponent. Where we need to get to is the level where film study enables us to impose our will on opponents instead. We're obviously not there yet.

TIGERS!!!!!

I keep seeing this when I read about this kid committing to LSU:

After Burrow and Daniels, we're back to a Mettenberger level of mobility st QB.

Poor guy.

Ironic that CBK was talking about how the stupid penalties killed us and that we have to have a "killer instinct" when the 1st personal foul was a 'killer shotgun' act. Lol.

Edited.

My postmortem thoughts. Every game matters. The last time we won a season opener was in 2018 2019 when Joe Burrow was under center and we had the greatest season of football in history. Much of this is due to scheduling - LSU doesn't schedule patsies for it's openers like many other teams do. This makes millions of dollars for the university because we are ALWAYS playing a ranked team on national TV each opening weekend. However, the coaching staff needs to have the team not only ready to play but ready to win these games. We didn't play bad last night we just didn't play good enough or make the plays we needed to make at the right times to win. Some say we SHOULD open the season with a patsy like the great BAMA does to iron out any kinks. Personally, I like playing a real opponent for every game and I'd prefer us to not schedule the little sisters of the poor to get a cheap win. I hate the University of Spoiled Children but honestly there is no shame in losing a close game to USC and this one literally came down to the wire. I'm upset that we lost, but it was a great game. The middle of our offensive line got abused and we did not have the players to abuse theirs - this is the game in a nutshell. It's not a cliche to say the game is won in the trenches, because it is. We didn't have the horses to be able to stuff it up the gut despite our efforts. Our RBs seems to get chopped down by arm tackles in many cases, which was frustrating. Our defense is improved. @Fishhead brought up in chat that Vegas knows something about betting lines and the over/under was won by people who bet on the under. Translated into the real world: our defense kept a potent Lincoln Riley coached offense to a very low scoring output. Having said that, we got gashed when the condoms needed to gash us. That circus catch early in the 1st half set the tone, sadly. For all our top 10 recruiting classes, we don't have enough talent in the defensive backfield and have safeties playing corner. This depletes our safety depth. Can we get Jacoby Matthews back home, yesterday? Like other teams, we defer to seniority to some extent for starting positions. This is part of our recruiting strategy in that we can assure commits that they will get a starting role if they stick with the program and put in their time. While I agree with that overall, I think we need to play the best players. Emery is a classic example here. You may recall that Emery was my mancrush (then was @houtiger's)...but he is a classic example of deferring to potential rather than actual productivity. He has historically underwhelmed. He did have a few good plays against USCw but he was also getting stuffed when we absolutely needed him to just get us 2 yards for a 1st down. We all want him to succeed and I get that we should reward his loyalty and dedication to the program by trying to put him in position for NFL scouts. IMHO, I have to wonder if Kaleb Jackson or Trey Holly would have gotten the needed yards when Emery was getting stuffed. I speculate that Emery's 'seniority' wound up trumping putting in the youngsters who do not have a major injury in the very recent past. I could be wrong. It's way too premature to write off the playoffs after a single loss. Right now, we're undefeated in conference games. Also, it is WAY better to lose a game early in the season than late in the season.

GEAUX!!!

Now whose barn am I supposed to light on fire?

I like the format. Wish we had a studio for you guys. I think we have better depth in the CB room than most think. It's not great and I'm loving the pledges that Corey Raymond is getting for the future but that does not help us this year. Not sure what the status is for Toviano, but I think PJ Woodland is going to be a nice surprise for us. Unfortunately, he is a true freshman and will make some freshman mistakes that will jade people's opinion of him (probably early) - give the kid some room to grow and I think he'll rise to the challenges (keeping fingers crossed that he or other players do not make stupid decisions outside of football like - well - Toviano did). On the defensive line, I won't be sleeping on Shand, Womack, Sai'vion Jones, McKinley, or Guillory. We brought a few guys in via the portal that I know zero about...hoping at least one of them shines or at least can rotate in as relief to provide 'flow'.

I was proud of how LSU took care of Krags. We made room for him in the house and made sure he had insurance coverage.