I’m picking Texas, and I hope I’m wrong.

That is where I am with LSU heading into Saturday night in Tiger Stadium, having seen enough improvement to recognize that something great is probably being built and enough familiar failure to continue to ask how close the Tigers really are. I want Lane Kiffin to succeed. I want the players to experience the satisfaction of finishing and emerging victorious in a big-time game like this. But wanting those things as a fan and predicting them are two different things, and at some point the team has to put up the evidence before people will truly believe, not without fantastical delusions, anyway.

Even those most optimistic about Kiffin’s first season settled into the familiar language of improvement long ago. Fair enough. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism for their previously held delusions, or maybe it is legitimate. But if “improvement” is the standard by which we are going to evaluate this, his first year, said improvement needs to actually mean something beyond “8-4” so fans can adjust their hopes and dreams going into the offseason.

In other words, if LSU doesn’t beat Texas or Tennessee, then fans might do well to temper their expectations for next year before launching into national title chatter.

LSU needed to end its SEC road losing streak dating back to October 2024. It did that at Auburn. The game against Alabama was the next step, with an entire program needing to show itself that it could stand toe to toe not just with a top-ten opponent, but with Alabama specifically, and inside Tiger Stadium. It did that for three quarters, to a degree at least. Wasted opportunity after wasted opportunity, and one instance of piss-poor game management after another, finally caught up with them and made the final score look like an embarrassment, which, let’s face it, it was. Once again, Tiger Stadium was emptying out in the fourth quarter, and let’s not blame the fans for their lack of loyalty. It is this football team that needs to meet these opportunities with more urgency.

Now comes another opportunity: beat a top-10 team, at night, in Tiger Stadium.

Notice we didn’t say “stand toe to toe” this time. No, Bama is another ghost all by itself for some reason, a top-tier matchup all unto itself. Texas? No, you need to beat this Texas team on your home turf, even with that No. 6 ranking before the name. And it doesn’t even matter that it’s at night.

Thank goodness we don’t have to listen to that nonsense from the head man this week.

Saturday night in Tiger Stadium will give LSU an intimidating advantage, sure. What it can’t do is execute for the players or make the necessary adjustments for the coaches. At some point, the emotion of it all has to become rock-solid, sound football, sustained even after the other team does something good it pays its players millions to do too.

The September win over preseason top-10 Texas A&M, which had fallen to No. 23 by the time LSU delivered that 35–6 drubbing, is clearly not the same thing in November. November is a different animal altogether, and beating a top-ten team late in the season would check off a box that hasn’t been checked for years now.

There is nothing unreasonable about characterizing “improvement” with that checkmark.

We do this in life, too, sometimes without noticing. Having made one necessary change, we keep referring to it when God places the next step for growth on our path. The progress was real, but the work isn’t finished. A man who has corrected one bad habit deserves encouragement and support, sure, but he can’t keep presenting that correction—most importantly to himself—as the ready-made answer to every subsequent opportunity for growth that he fails to take advantage of.

That is part of what we have meant by living and working inside a football program according to a rule. The obligation remains long after the initial enthusiasm has passed.

Could Clemson be any further in the rearview mirror than it is now?

We’re sure you’ve seen the lopsided stats up and down the columns in favor of LSU against Alabama, but the team cannot go into this showdown forgetting that it outgained the Tide 457–285 and lost 31–13, failing on all four fourth-down attempts. Those numbers clearly provide a microcosm of who these Tigers are—they can absolutely compete and are among the best teams in the country, but when it comes down to the difficulties of grinding out close, winnable games, they have fallen flat on their faces each and every time this season.

Against the Longhorns, we want to see more creativity in the offense without having to ask a receiver to throw a touchdown pass or have the commentator announce the “trickeration” of it. The creativity of the offense under Kiffin and Weis Jr. that everyone thought they were getting—a creativity unleashed so masterfully when LSU was these guys’ opponent (is that not the most infuriating thing about this?)—also belongs in the ordinary work of an offense: the lateral movement, the pre-snap disguises, the misdirection, the traps, the counters. How often did we see Kiffin-led teams stay one step ahead of LSU’s defense in past seasons? Is it so much to ask that we see it now?

Or is running up the gut behind a sometimes-gutless interior offensive line suddenly all you’ve got in the redzone? Did you see the design of Bama’s first touchdown?

Help the weakness of your team out. Make them look like they did on the Dilin Jones third-quarter touchdown run. Help them and stop asking them to do things they’re not good at.

On defense, the challenge is similar. Blake Baker’s unit has produced plenty of stats worth praising, but it still needs to do more. Specifically, its statistical prowess needs to be accompanied by a stop when the team needs a door to be shut.

Ole Miss and Kentucky are examples. Alabama, yikes, is an example.

We all saw it. After LSU finally took a 13–10 lead against Alabama, the Tide answered with a five-play, 75-yard touchdown drive. You had the first big play, but maybe more importantly, you had the third-and-nine on which they couldn’t force a field goal that would’ve made it 13-13. Even giving them the punt return that set up their next touchdown, that still only makes it 20-13. Stop them on third and nine, and perhaps Kiffin isn’t going for it on fourth-and-ten on his own 20, and Bama isn’t scoring that late touchdown to make it 31-13.

Fans should be glad the single play here and the single play there didn’t translate into, let’s say, a 23-20 loss similar to the one-possession losses they’d experienced earlier in the season. Perhaps it is the final scoreboard’s ass-kicking that will force the team to realize how truly quickly a game can spin out of control because of one play.

Give Bama that big play after the Tigers took the lead—as indefensible as even that is—and simply stop them on third and nine.

And look at the cascade of things that could have been different.

Bottom line is what Brian Kelly so often talked about: complementary football. Against Texas, can both sides of the ball help each other finish, instead of leaving fans and bloggers to argue afterward about which side deserves the larger portion of the blame? Those are reasonable November demands and team responses that help create the win-loss record by the end of the season.

To misplace a faith-based term in the world of college football, but one folks will understand, September grace is not November grace.

Kiffin has something to prove now that maybe he didn’t need to prove in Oxford or Lexington. According to one report, Kiffin’s career record against top-10 teams stands at 6–18. Six wins in 24 opportunities is a problem that predates this roster, this so-called “different” football program.

There is context, of course, a context Kiffin was likely referring to when he coined the phrase “Just Different.” Kiffin has coached at programs with different resources and different expectations, and his work at Ole Miss was impressive. Ole Miss doesn’t have the same modern pedigree as LSU when it comes to national titles, and so the standard was completely different there.

But LSU hired him with the expectation that that ability at a less prestigious school would translate into winning the games that separate a good program from a championship contender. The players have to develop, the offense has to score in the redzone, and the defense has to close games in the bottom of the ninth. But Kiffin, too, has to emerge. Coach Kiffin can’t apply the language of growth to the football program as a whole without applying it—and in very specific ways, not just “8-4”—to his own work on Saturdays.

I still see and respect the substance in Kiffin’s discussions of preparation, attention, and maturity—it’s what my support of him and this “Right Lane” series is about. It is why I want him to keep examining whether everything surrounding his team helps those most-excellent principles take root. His own account of growth through subtraction has provided this space’s most fruitful ground to explore that. If a routine, an attraction, or a public show even appears to be more important than the discipline and development of the program—and victories that follow Victory Hill—he must be willing to cut it.

We’ve been saying this long before Leonard Fournette went on a profanity-laced tirade about it and long before TigerDroppings got its claws into it.

If anyone still doubts that a celebrity-fueled Tiger Walk can affect a team of football players, as we explored on Tuesday but also on October 12 (and even indirectly before with these series), watch the entirety of the following video featuring former Tiger Tyrann Mathieu. Acknowledging his own participation in the walk before a home game earlier this season, Mathieu returns to his concerns several times—several times—even joining in a running joke about what Kevin Costner was doing there this past Saturday. Listen to the conversation in full and see if you still believe a football team doesn’t notice and think about these things.

 

Finds Inside the Finebaums

All of that—and I guess we worked a little backwards today—brings us to the material we held from Tuesday for this second installment of the article, particularly the message displayed inside LSU’s football operations building Monday. Some of it is good, but when combined with the not-so-good, it raises the same question about what the coach is asking his team to concentrate on.

Let’s just take some of the final words by themselves and try to make some good from them: “Own it. Learn from it. Get better because of it.”

Good. Taken by themselves, we like those words.

But earlier in the same message, the employees in the building are welcomed to “THE DARK SIDE OF BEING THE VILLAIN!”

Coach Kiffin, man, couldn’t that have been left out?

Sure, maybe it helped unite the team at an earlier point in the season. Maybe there are players who find that idea motivating. But continuing to understand yourself through the role you perceive other people assigning to you—particularly after the villain role hasn’t gotten you victories in Oxford and Lexington—still gives those people entirely too much influence over your attention. If the objective is to free the team from outside noise, there is reason on the fans’ end to challenge and even rebuke a message that keeps reminding that team of who is making the noise.

The approval of Paul Finebaum and his ilk is not something LSU needs to gain before taking on Texas. Beat Texas and they’ll still have something destructive to say.

Biblically speaking—again remember all my LSU talk is to help everyone who loves the Tigers become better souls whilst still enjoying the colors and pageantry of it all—that is where Jeremias 25 gives us another consideration, with Babylon becoming an instrument of chastisement and itself being held accountable for its original iniquity—which God ordained in itself. Someone’s wrongdoing—like let’s say a Finebaum “analysis”—doesn’t make everything he opines about someone untrue. We can recognize the unfair attack and still find fruit in elements of the fault being attacked, without treating either side as wholly innocent.

This is that binary trap question I always talk about.

It also doesn’t make a football loss a verdict on a man’s soul, which is probably how it feels sometimes to a man like Kiffin. It does mean that a critic’s crappy tone and conduct can’t be an exemption from the lesson, or from the correction. I used to think this way all the time when a parent came at me concerning the classroom—most times they were wrong, but I’d ask God, “Lord, what is the minutia inside this insult, this injustice, that can purify my soul, that can make me a better human being, that can maybe prepare me for a similar but worse encounter on the horizon?” We don’t look at injustices that way. We see them and just automatically go into defense mode, and we very often miss the lesson that is actually trying to help us get to where we want to be.

In other words, Finebaum’s hatred of Kiffin or his instructions from the puppeteers at Disney to stir up shit included, what is the message inside the shit that can help Kiffin lead LSU to the national title?

I realize that God probably couldn’t care less about college football or its trophies. But he does care about his children inside its world. Develop a devotion to the Divine Office all day every day and tell me he doesn’t work for the good of those who love him through everything.

The strongest portions of Monday’s billboard already direct the team toward the right things, toward its own responsibilities. If you’ve been establishing the rule as we’ve insisted, Coach Kiffin—and as you yourself have insisted—perhaps a billboard wasn’t even necessary. Billboard or no billboard, though, I would have trusted “Own it. Learn from it. Get better because of it”—which would have allowed you the wonder of not needing a magnifying glass to read it—all by itself, and without re-injecting the idea of noise into the situation.

Leaving that part out would not mean the Finebaums won. It would mean Kiffin was practicing the wisdom we admired in him in the first place. It would mean he would have learned not to have to get that last verbal jab in, as we challenged him to do a long time ago after the Clemson game.

Psalm 140, also prayed in the Divine Office, demands restraint in speech, resistance to excuses, and a willingness to receive correction without seeking refuge in flattery. That applies to the coach receiving criticism, to the “expert” on a warpath, and the fan deciding to which parts he will attach his belief.

It certainly reaches the writer writing this article, which is why you get God right alongside Coach Kiffin and the Tiger team.

Final Words

For this week, at this point in the week, all of that is water under the bridge, a lesson hopefully for next week and beyond. The football test against a formidable sixth-ranked foe by itself is clear enough. More moxie and finishing the job on offense. A defense that rises to the occasion when it matters. Four quarters in which the response to adversity looks like something expected and practiced, like what you saw from an unflappable Bama team last Saturday.

I’m picking Texas not because I’m rooting against the Tigers, obviously, but because LSU has not yet given me enough reason to predict that complete performance against this level of opponent. Plus that small superstitious part of me thinks I can help them win because of it (ha). I hope the Tigers give me that reason Saturday, leaving me with a wrong pick and even more reason to pick Tennessee in Knoxville next week.

The opportunity is there, regardless of what I or anyone else thinks. It is up to LSU, and Lane Kiffin, to take it.

Thank you for reading The Hayride!