Ok, LSU, it’s time to go win a football game.

Hopefully this week you’ve been adhering to the only task at hand that matters—not some vain insistence on calculating playoff odds—but zeroing in on your focus, your passion for the game, your personal integrity that develops intrinsic motivation that can carry you when things go south.

“It’s about your process. It’s about how you work and how you come to work every day,” Kiffin said Monday.

Sounds like that Saban documentary series. Good. Then Saturday is another opportunity to show what that means when things around Baton Rouge haven’t been much fun, like when you lose to UAB or to Florida 41-9.

Or to ULM if you’re catching my drift and thinking Alabama did it too.

Because frankly, LSU, I think you’re better than you’ve been the last few seasons. I know there are a lot of folks out there saying things that equate you to the previous ones under the previous regime, but I see a squad that can play poorly on the road in the SEC and still put themselves in a position to win. I see a team that is still figuring out how to start fast, how to finish with a death grip, and what exactly its identity is in terms of playing it conservative or playing it according to the reasons for which your head coach was hired in the first place.

Coach Kiffin, don’t run from the success waiting for you—that is a life lesson all of us can understand.

Conservative play calling on both sides of the ball notwithstanding, I don’t see what I saw the previous two seasons, against Texas A&M, for instance, when those teams met adversity and absolutely quit. They quit to the tune of 38–23 and 49–25, once on the road and once at home. And they quit in other games too. Alabama in a night game in Tiger Stadium in 2024 also comes to mind, when they quit before they even ran onto the field.

“You have four chances to win,” Kiffin said of the game at Kentucky. “If one of these plays goes right, and we win one of these plays, you’re winning today. And it’s one yard. So I don’t overreact either way.”

Correct. Trust the process. Focus on each play, and each play only. That’s it.

Whether or not Mississippi State’s injured quarterback is effective shouldn’t impact any of this. The tactical part of the game—sure, you listen to your coaches and execute accordingly in that regard. But regarding your focus, passion, and integrity, the Bulldogs could be throwing my little nephew out there and it shouldn’t impact the intrinsic motivation aspect of this one bit.

It is everything I was saying to you and anyone willing to listen just a couple of weeks ago in the following video. It’s everything I’ve believed on the court and in the classroom since 2001. You have to live life by a rule. And that rule will get you through both the highs and lows spoken of in the Book of Ecclesiastes. That rule will get you past the surface of your 4-2 record.

The rule you choose for yourself—the discipline, the practice, the grind—must order the day whether you wake up excited or not. The work is still there on a bad day. So is your obligation to the teammates beside you.

And at 11 am Saturday, you may have to create something Tiger Stadium handed to you gleefully against Clemson and Texas A&M. If the crowd is a little quieter for this morning kickoff, and bodies in the upper seats are somewhat sparse, so what? Those people aren’t responsible for your assignment on third down. You are.

The rat poison you need to reject now comes from the voices in the media and in the fanbase telling you your season is over, because you can’t beat Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee in November, because you aren’t going 6-0 to end the season. The rat poison isn’t them glorifying you anymore like it was after Clemson. It’s them making you sound irrelevant.

A playoff projection shouldn’t have made any practice rep irrelevant this week. There is plenty left to fight for before anybody even brings up the P word.

And that little bubbling of anger that rises from hearing it all? That’s the good stuff. That’s the good anger. You use it. You put it to work. You put it into your mental prep today and tomorrow. But when it settles down, as anger eventually does, the rule is still there to stabilize. You use them both to stir that intrinsic motivation that doesn’t care what the score is, who the opponent is, what the fans are saying—because you’re an LSU Fighting Tiger, and that’s all that matters to you right now.

Go win the game, LSU, not to keep your playoff hopes alive or so Pat McAfee will get berserk for you again. Where are your standards? Go win because you want to prove you are winners, and will simply never quit.

No matter what.

Tigers, 31-21.

Thank you for reading The Hayride!