LSU should not lose to Kentucky in football. Certainly, 4–2 through the more manageable half of this ridiculous schedule should be cause for concern for the LSU brass.

Scott McKay addressed much of this yesterday, everything from the egregious officiating, to the villain persona Kiffin embraced for the program now turning into a joke, to Blake Baker’s inconsistent defenses. It’s a good take, and I invite you to read it. The question I pose today involves possibilities Lane Kiffin must consider so the Tigers’ electric, dominating performances start travelling with the team outside Tiger Stadium.

In at least one press conference, maybe two as I think back, Kiffin has described blending Nick Saban’s approach with Pete Carroll’s. Discipline alongside freedom, swagger, and fun. An attractive combination obviously. On the surface one would think, of course, if anyone can pull that off, you’d never lose again.

But something appears to be missing, at least from my vantage point in observing it all so far this year, and that goes even into the things Kiffin says. And it is something we talk about a lot in relation to the faith life and even society.

Order.

Carroll’s great USC teams of the early 2000s operated in a different world. Today, social media, NIL money, and the transfer portal compete for a young player’s attention in ways it didn’t back then. Alongside that, the media’s college football conversations have narrowed from bowl destinations through the 1990s to BCS standings to four-team playoffs and now twelve-team playoffs. At 4–2, a team can feel wholly irrelevant by halftime of the season, and with today’s player not at all loyal to the colors of a university, that can spell disaster for the rest of the season.

If there’s nothing to fight for, and there isn’t according to everything being said on the electronic screen, why fight? Why get injured and risk a bigger payday in the portal in a few months?

Just look at what’s happening at Texas A&M right now.

Are we going to completely discount the biggest elephant in the room—the fact that these are young people, already prone to emotional highs and lows, and now some of them are filthy rich? You could teach an entire elective on how terrible that combination can become.

Are we going to completely discount the biggest elephant in the room there is—the fact that these are teenagers, who are already emotional and volatile, and now they’re filthy rich teenagers, which should take an elective to teach how terrible of a combination that can become.

A coach like Kiffin now must give the rest of the schedule a purpose beyond whether the electronic screen still considers his team worth a damn.

And as a sort of aside, that is why I’ve always bemoaned the amount of money being thrown around in college football. The expectations are exacerbated on the fans’ end and become another unwieldy burden on players whose emotional maturity can’t match the dollars rolling in. There are consequences to fixing things with the obvious choice sometimes, especially when it’s with money. Just read the Divine Office every day and over time you’ll start to understand why. This goes well beyond any religion or faith. This is basic human nature we’re talking about.

And now we’re making teenagers be adults with money when they’re not ready to be adults with money, and then we complain when they don’t perform to the standards we’ve concocted on our own in our heads, the championships and joy we’ve already won for ourselves as fans.

And the problem will be infinitely worse in the SEC because, for all the reasons Kiffin himself has stated, the conference, especially at nine games now, five of which will be on the road for LSU this season, simply doesn’t give you a breather. Especially when you finally do get a breather on the schedule in Kentucky and Mississippi State this year—but lo and behold! They’re not bad either in 2026.

It all makes me go back to our discussion of Saint Benedict in that YouTube podcast/presentation a couple of weeks ago. In a monastery, the rule orders the day before anyone decides whether he feels particularly inspired to follow it, before he even wakes up in the middle of the night for prayer. In the monastery, practice, discipline, correction, and obligation cannot depend on emotions or how an individual feels on any given bad day.

There is also something of the biblical wineskins image here, or bottles if you read the Douay-Rheims (Matt 9:14–17). Kiffin can’t simply pour his ambitions for this generation into the structure and arrangements—the bottle—that worked for another. The daily structure must fit the pressures these modern-day players actually face.

Yes, he’s spoken to that structure in the past, which is one reason I’ve been impressed by his leadership before the Kentucky game. But after it, now on Monday morning, I’d invite him to consider the things we’re saying here and reassess any holes in the machinery.

Have the Tigers learned to create their own intensity, the intrinsic motivation I so often preached to my own players, without the glamour and roar of the crowd? Or does the excitement surrounding certain home games—particularly when sexy ex-athletes and former players and celebrity rappers are walking down Victory Hill with you—create something too big for a structure of mental discipline that hasn’t quite been formed yet?

Are you trying to pour new wine into old wineskins?

We can’t diagnose that from a blog space, but I’ve been fortunate enough to be right on a lot of observations in life, not all, but a lot, and I think it’s worth considering, if Coach Kiffin happens to read The Hayride haha.

Just think about it, Coach.

It is most certainly a question worth asking before Saturday’s morning kickoff against Mississippi State—a team you’d better not sleepwalk against or you will lose.

When the upper decks have glaringly empty seats and the crowd lacks the Clemson and A&M games’ electricity, what then if your team is not disciplined enough to understand intrinsic motivation? A football team can’t hold the home crowd responsible for that, and if not trained in the ways we’re discussing here today, a certain resentment and lack of energy could creep into play.

Remember the Gerry DiNardo days and what happened after all that talk about bringing the magic back to Tiger Stadium and how they indeed brought it back that one night against Auburn in 1995, and then what happened to that program on the road and during day home games after that. You had the high against No. 1 Florida in ‘97—which happened 15 years ago yesterday incidentally.

You also had Ole Miss at 11 am the next week.

You had Notre Dame in a day game too.

Nick Saban’s famous breakthrough came before Michigan State upset No. 1 Ohio State in Columbus in 1998. Working with psychiatry professor Lionel Rosen, he narrowed the task to the next play—the next six seconds—rather than the potentiality of a deflating result, which of course creates fear inside the human psyche.

Which of course debilitates play.

You must must must take all of this into account, and now in 2026 even more so than you did 28 years ago.

Players thinking, for whatever reason after the Ole Miss loss, that they must remain unbeaten until November would have their attention pulled in precisely the wrong direction. What happens when that condition is broken, like it was Saturday night in Lexington? What happens when you’re ranked at the “irrelevant” No. 21 spot?

What happens when everything they’re seeing on social media is negativity and catastrophe syndrome from Tiger fans, and gleeful ridicule from everyone else?

Even Saban needed time. His 2000 Tigers beat ranked Tennessee and Mississippi State at home before electric crowds at night while struggling on the road. By his third season came the shocking 36–7 win at Florida; in 2003, LSU won every road game on its way to the championship.

Then he started again at Alabama—and lost at home to Louisiana-Monroe in 2007. The Tide looked far from the teams and program it would come to be as it won six national titles before Saban would retire. Understanding that history doesn’t excuse the Kentucky loss, or all the sense-defying things that happened Saturday night, but it does remind us that establishing the right habits—the right wineskin—takes more than hiring the right coach.

That can help the overly rabid fan cope. But we finish by saying what we started with—such patience cannot be the calling card of Kiffin.

Money hasn’t and never will fix the problem of young adult emotional volatility. It can make navigating this new college football world harder on them.

And Kiffin must be the adult in the room, a quarterback of sorts, and start to tweak a few things he wants for the program, but that the program maybe simply isn’t ready for yet.

He still has time. But while he establishes the depth and discipline of Nick Saban, the fun of USC and Pete Carroll must be monitored and meted out carefully. The order of things must be correct. Because if this continues, even the night games at Tiger Stadium will become a sort of vacation, a circus, from the real work that lies ahead of losing miserably the following Saturday to the next conference foe.

Or a miserable morning game on the horizon in Tiger Stadium.

Thank you for reading The Hayride!

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