It’d be funny if it wasn’t so sad

Published 9:59 am Sunday, November 22, 2015

OXFORD, Miss. — What LSU did Saturday defies logical explanation.

So don’t ask me.

If Alabama was predictable and Arkansas was a hangover, then what in the world were the Tigers up to during Ole Miss 38, LSU 17?

I couldn’t tell you.

Afterward, the players spent more time insisting that they must live a whale of a tight cocoon because, golly gee, they hadn’t heard anything all week about Les Miles’ job supposedly being on the line on this frigid afternoon.

And Miles swore he hadn’t told them anything about it.

So scratch that excuse.

“I’m a non-factor there,” Miles said when asked if this disjointed, mistake-filled game might be due to the distractions of his job security.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” said defensive tackle Christian LaCouture, the only player to give a hint he’d heard something was up. “Coach Miles is our guy and we love him to death.”

They sure had a strange way of showing it Saturday.

If Miles’ job wasn’t on the line before Saturday’s shenanigans, it almost certainly is now.

And how do you defend this?

Miles claimed the Tigers practiced all week for this performance, although you couldn’t have proved it as the day wore on.

Really?

Do they practice holding, false starts and dumbfounded looks in the secondary?

It was the 10th game of the season.

It’s not just that LSU has now lost three consecutive games for the first time this century.

It’s that the Tigers have gotten steadily worse — seemingly more lost and confused and frustrated — with each passing week since starting out 7-0. And, gosh, doesn’t that seem like a century or two ago?

It’s mind-boggling.

Anybody checking in Saturday for the bounceback was at the wrong spot. The free fall was still alive and well.

Ordinarily, you’d proclaim this, surely, to be Rock Bottom. But the Tigers still have one more game in the regular season and apparently will still go to some bowl, probably an off-brand flavor.

Who knows what they have up their sleeve for Texas A&M?

Granted, this fiasco will be a hard act to top. But you would have said the same thing last week.

Saturday it almost went beyond ugly. The last three weeks have fans no longer dickering with aesthetics. But this time it was almost …

What? Comical?

Possibly. Football as light satire.

Maybe it was the final Ole Miss touchdown.

It’s been an adventurous season defensively all year.

Ole Miss’ first play from scrimmage, for instance, was a 57-yard completion.

Maybe the Tigers were more worried about pronouncing Quincy Adeboyejo’s name than covering him.

No, safety Jalen Mills said, “A miscommunication.”

Gee, who’d have ever thunk it?

LSU is about to beat that particular gag to death, though it still got a lot of laughs from the Ole Miss crowd.

But the Tiger defenders, if you can call them that, never looked more gullible than on Ole Miss’ absolute clinching touchdown late in the third quarter.

It was third-and-17 for Ole Miss … and LSU fell for it again.

A misdirection throwback is not exactly a new development just now cooked up in the trick-play lab.

But it doesn’t take much to sucker LSU in these days, and the whole gang of them were happily in pursuit of Rebels quarterback Chad Kelly when the merry prankster abruptly stopped and pulled another fast one on them.

He threw it back across the field to where Evan Engram had little in the way of Tigers to deter him from a 36-yard touchdown.

The Rebs fans had a good chuckle over the look on LSU’s face with that one.

Oh, but the Tigers weren’t done yet.

Encore! Encore!

So the fourth quarter was when it crossed the line of humor and plunged into downright farcical.

LSU had not one, but two situations of first-and-goal from the half-yard line, and turned both of them into “Saturday Night Live” skits.

Never mind that the Tigers scored on one of them — on a fumble no less, recovered by lineman Will Clapp, the fans here seemed to appreciate the effort.

Get to the half-yard line with four chances, and that’s when LSU’s boring ol’ offense decides to get cutesy.

It was a scream watching them, twice, play hot potatoe with the football when plays you wouldn’t draw up on the playground when, for once, maybe Leonard Fournette up the middle might have been prudent.

Coaching?

I’m not sure you can coach that kind of hilarity.

So there will be another week for LSU’s players to get the message that their beloved head coach might be under a bit of heat.

“I go to work and I try to do the best things,” Miles said. “If I can get that done, we’ll have success. And if I don’t, you guys will all be writing a bunch of other stuff.”

Me, I’m running low on adjectives.