Tag Archives: lsu

The de facto national championship preview: The fans

Posted on by
3

College football’s de facto national championship, #1 LSU vs. #2 Alabama, is tomorrow night. We’ve already previewed the coaches and players. That leaves the fans.

I am not a fan of either team, but I have seen both teams play a couple times and had a chance to observe their fans in person. I don’t remember much in particular about Alabama fans, except that I don’t care for their particular shade of redcrimson and there are some people who should not use houndstooth as a full-body-covering textile. I do remember LSU fans tailgating so hard it resulted in the permanent closing of the prime visitors’ tailgate area at Vanderbilt games.

Instead of extolling deep insights– of which I have none– about these two fan bases, and how they will affect the game atmosphere, which in turn will affect the game itself, I’ve collected (or are we supposed to say “curated” now, and what ever happened to mere “compiling”?) a few bullet-pointed items on the surely crazed fan bases of these two teams. I hereby reserve the right to add to this list without telling you I’ve done so. Reader submissions welcomed.

  • As of Monday of this week, ESPN reported that individual tickets to this game were going for $10,423.14. “Oh, and these aren’t even close to being the best seats out there. They are in the lower level of the end zone and in row 25. You can choose between seat 17 or 18. That doesn’t come with catered food or secure you from sitting behind someone who you might consider a giant.”
  •  


  • Click to see the rest of this mess of fandom

The de facto national championship preview: The players

Posted on by
3

Yesterday’s de facto national championship preview focused on the coaches. Today’s looks at the players.

Alabama and LSU players were in the news before the season even started, which, given each team’s potential for success isn’t surprising by itself. That both teams’ players were in the preseason news for off-field reasons is notable, though. It may seem like an age ago, but Alabama was one of the places hit very hard by the tornadoes that devastated parts of the lower Midwest and Southeast earlier this year. Tuscaloosa was a direct hit. A month later, Sports Illustrated ran a cover story by Lars Anderson that is one of the most powerful sports pieces I’ve read. Facing personal losses themselves, the Tide football players nevertheless had to stand tall in a community and a state that looked to them– as they always had in good times– for support in bad times. Terror, Tragedy And Hope in Tuscaloosa.

LSU players made their way into the preseason, non-sports news in a manner less worthy of an emotional SI cover and an earnest letter home. Keep reading…

The de facto national championship preview: The coaches

Posted on by
5

In college football, players come and go, and it’s the coaches who are more likely to become the lasting face of a particular team. Adding to this is the common college football notion of coaching “systems.” Coaching in the NFL is more about coordinators and their “schemes”– the Wide Nine really isn’t a defensive “system,” and the Wildcat really isn’t an offensive one, though it may be offensive to some– although coaches have developed systems at that level, including Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense and Tony Dungy’s Tampa 2. Systems certainly are in play at the high school level, but they frequently are crazy and not at all viable even at the college level. Think Wing-T, A-11, and, of course, the Wishbone.

The major college level is the Goldilocks of coaching systems, however, and along with this comes coaching personalities and attitudes that can influence the on-field performance of the impressionable, yet quite capable yoots.  

This installment of our ongoing coverage of LSU vs. Alabama, the de facto national championship, therefore focuses on the two coaches …Keep reading…

The de facto national championship

Posted on by
7

One of college football’s biggest challenges, from an institutional perspective, has been its ability to crown a consensus national champion at year’s end. The first memory I have of controversy in this regard was the 1997 split championship between Michigan and Nebraska that precipitated the implementation of the BCS in 1998. (I don’t know if that decision actually precipitated the BCS, because that system may have been in the works already, but it felt that way at the time.) The BCS did not bring peace and happiness across the land, however, and the criticism that started then– I recall writing an editorial on the arbitrariness of BCS outcomes as sports editor of a newspaper in the early 2000s– has only grown in scope and volume, even reaching the halls of the U.S. Senate and the Department of Justice, and the favors it grants upon certain athletic conferences certainly has been part of the fuel for the conference realignment conflagration that burns to this day.

By some magic mix of scheduling, on-field performance, coaching, recruiting, and everything else that goes into making one particular football game happen the way it happens and mean what it means, though, we have been gifted a national championship game this year that really is as free from controversy as one could imagine, a matchup of two undefeated teams, either of which could be ranked #1, playing in the toughest division of the toughest conference in the country, and largely dominating their opponents to this point. On Saturday night in Tuscaloosa, #1 LSU will meet #2 Alabama for what many see as the de facto national championship. The BCS’ noncomical Rube Goldberg machine may churn out a pairing at season’s end that will garner national consensus, but this Saturday’s game is a guarantee; it provides certainty and assurance, things the BCS largely has failed to give teams and fans since its inception.

In anticipation of this game, plan on daily coverage this week* from ALDLAND to get you ready for it.

* Disclosure: This is likely to severely decrease our unplanned coverage of the Breeders’ Cup. In our stead, I recommend the sports page of the Louisville Courier-Journal.

It’s Monday in ALDLAND

Posted on by
1

We’re about a month into the college and professional football seasons, so there aren’t too many unknowns anymore. The media-fueled big matchup for Saturday, LSU goes to Morgantown, wasn’t close, and the outcome wasn’t surprising. LSU has been operating a professional-grade defense for years, and Jordan Jefferson (allegedly) curb-stomping a U.S. Marine may have been the best thing that could happen to their offense outside of alum Shaq O’Neil going in at fullback.

After Michigan State’s failure to board the bus and make any appearance whatsoever last week in South Bend, I put them on a one-week suspension and channeled my attention to Clemson, the MSU of the South. Those Tigers did not disappoint on what was a big day for the South Carolina schools. (Side note: I thought Vandy had a chance to at least play SC close given a 3-0 start and the schools’ dead even history over the last four games, but having more penalty yards than total offensive yards is going to make that difficult.) I imagine I’ll be keeping my eyes on the Clemson squad until they remember who they are (the Michigan State of the South) and totally blow it due to sheer lack of discipline.

Speaking of Michigan State Keep reading…

Less cowbell Friday

Posted on by
Reply

Mississippi State lost a defensive struggle to SEC West foe LSU last night in Starkville. The visitors had a 6-3 lead at the half, and I thought the Bulldogs had the winning edge a couple times in the third quarter, but they couldn’t quite overcome LSU, which finally broke the dam in the fourth and won 19-6. Mississippi State still is a team on the rise, but I’m not sure they’re going to get a chance to improve on last year’s nine-win season until 2012.

Because I couldn’t come up with a Friday-themed Friday jam, I’ll make it up to you with two clips. I guess everybody’s got to have a thing (I guess?), and Mississippi State has made the cowbell its thing. Two clips to try to cheer up Bulldog fans and remind everyone else that something sorta good came out of Starkville once:

The final chapter of the Ole Miss mascot search

Posted on by
7

The sports media’s football coverage in August has focused almost exclusively on the NFL to the exclusion of the fast-approaching college season. This is a small attempt to balance that coverage by taking a concluding look at a story that started to gain steam during the 2010 college football season.

On Saturday, September 3rd, the Ole Miss football team will take the field in Oxford with something they haven’t had since 2003: a mascot. The school’s teams will continue to be known as the Rebels, but after officially retiring Colonel Reb in ’03, the Rebel Black Bear now will represent Ole Miss squads on the field.

While Mississippi’s black bear population recently has been on the rise, particularly in the Delta region, the selection of the Rebel Black Bear was something of a second-best option, at least for a vocal subset of Ole Miss students and others watching off campus. This pre-selection video highlights the one-time top contender:

As the video suggested, copyright law of some variety formally took Admiral Ackbar out of the running, he surely would have made one of the most interesting and creative mascots in college football. Geekery aside, it also would have been a great marketing opportunity for George Lucas & co.

By dumping Col. Reb, Ole Miss distanced themselves from some of the school’s decidedly Confederate trappings, a motive that also drove revisions related to their fight song, “From Dixie With Love.” Students traditionally had concluded the song by chanting “the South will rise again.” Instead, “the Ole Miss student government passed a resolution suggesting the chant be replaced by the phrase, ‘To hell with LSU.'”