There has been something of a debate this week following a column by Advocate sportswriter Scott Rabalais, who upbraided LSU fans over their likely exercise of a time-honored custom – namely, loud, melodramatic booing of the visiting team when it takes the field – when the football team from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point enters Tiger Stadium…

Hey, LSU fans, I know it’s pretty much a tradition to boo the opposing team when it runs onto the field in Tiger Stadium. And when it’s Auburn or Alabama or Florida, I kind of get it, though I personally don’t think you should ever boo college kids.

But Saturday’s game, and Saturday’s opponent, is different. It’s not just any team visiting this Saturday. It’s the United States Military Academy.

For the young men playing LSU on Saturday, their next stop isn’t the NFL. It’s an eight-year commitment as Army officers in a combination of active duty and reserve service. Possibly putting their lives on the line to protect your right to boo Auburn or Alabama or Florida.

Rabalais doesn’t bother to provide any context – after all, Army has never played in Tiger Stadium before, so most LSU fans wouldn’t have a frame of reference as to what usually happens in college stadia where they’re the visitors – around his exhortation. Instead, all we get is this…

So if you’re at the game Saturday, when Army takes the field, how about some polite applause? Or just stay respectfully silent. I strongly urge LSU to publicly promote either.

I can’t tell you what the normal protocol is when playing one of the service academies. None of them has ever played at Tiger Stadium since I’ve been around, and I’ve only ever watched Army, Navy and Air Force play on television.

I wouldn’t imagine most LSU fans would have the same lust for booing a service academy team that they would a Tulane or Colorado State, much less Ole Miss or Texas A&M.

And looking around for some precedent for Army playing in one of the cathedrals of college football that would be a decent reference for Saturday’s game, all I found was this…

So I’m not going to say Rabalais’ exhortation for politeness is wrongheaded. If anything, one is given to wonder why he even thought it was necessary to put that out there.

But I have a good idea why.

Do you know who’s going to toss the coin before the game Saturday?

John Bel Edwards.

Edwards is hosting his 30-year reunion of his West Point class this week in Baton Rouge. He has military brass coming in from all over the planet, and this is more or less his final moment in the sun as a lame-duck governor. What I heard is he’s got more than 500 people coming to a reception tonight, and he’ll entertain them at the governor’s mansion before busing them to Tiger Stadium for the game tomorrow.

This is going to be Edwards’ show. He’s governor of Louisiana and he graduated law school at LSU, but he was a West Point cadet and boy, did he trade on that to get elected back in 2015.

And everybody in a position of authority at LSU is absolutely terrified that when Edwards steps on to that football field and is announced to the crowd – some 100,000 people, or the better part of that number, the vast majority of whom just voted to elect a candidate as politically different from Edwards as they could find – the reaction is not going to be good.

So how do you mitigate that? Go and plant a column, using Rabalais who’s carried water for LSU’s administration more than once before, demanding that nobody boo Army.

So that when they boo Edwards, they’ll be booing Army.

Honestly, this weak attempt at spin, if in fact that’s what it is (and I’d be surprised if it isn’t), deserves booing in its own right.

I’m not really going to get into the question of whether it’s appropriate to boo Army’s team when they come out of the locker room. It’s rude to do that, but on the other hand, that’s part of the experience of playing in Tiger Stadium as a visitor and most of the players who go through it say it’s a thrill, not an insult – so why deny it to the kids from Army?

I could go either way on that.

But if you think John Bel Edwards has been incompetent, dishonest and corrupt as Louisiana’s governor, or if on Saturday you think you’ll finally have an opportunity to tell him what you think of his threatening to kill college football if he didn’t get tax increases, or his COVID lockdowns, or his vetoes of things like the pediatric sex-change ban bill, the Zuckerbucks bill, the girls’ sports bill or his predatory line-item vetoes of spending projects in the districts of conservative legislators, and you think that’s worthy of booing, then by God you should do exactly that when he walks onto that field.

And you shouldn’t be moved otherwise by Scott Rabalais or anybody else.

Believe me, none of the kids who play on Army’s football team will care one bit.