LSU tends to be under weather for openers

Published 3:35 pm Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Before getting started here today, I guess we’ll need the standardissue disclaimer that in the overall scheme of the universe, a mere football game ranks pretty far down the totem pole.

Maybe somewhere below life and death, home and hearth, and above missing the “Game of Thrones” season finale.

But we generally talk football here, and if you deviate from that then you let the hurricanes win.

Besides, with LSU football, this is getting way too uncanny to blame on coincidence anymore.

Moral of the story: schedule LSU at your own risk.

Or, at the least, hire Jim Cantore as your offensive coordinator beforehand, maybe sign on with The Weather Channel for the TV rights.

And, by all means, keep your travel plans flexible.

Take BYU.

It must have seemed like a dandy idea at the time for the Cougars.

Good neutral site in Houston, respected opponent, big modern NFL stadium to show off your wares in a hotbed of recruiting. Pleasant trip for fans, too, different part of the country. Get away from all those pesky mountain vistas.

But they made the crucial mistake of letting LSU get involved.

Now the Morman-based school, which recently had to clarify its loosened stance on drinking coffee and soft drinks on campus (admissible but still frowned upon) finds itself being shipped to Bourbon Street, slap dab in the middle of the “Southern Decadence Festival,” one of the wildest, free-wheeling annual celebrations of unabashed New Orleans debauchery extant, some of it semi-clothed.

You can imagine the shock and awe.

How did this happen?

LSU happened.

Remember the mea culpa line from “Animal House.” “You (messed) up. You trusted us.”

The Tigers are becoming the canary in the mine shaft when it comes to predicting natural disasters in advance.

Home, away, neutral — doesn’t matter. LSU fingerprints will be somewhere.

Cantore probably sends LSU’s schedule to his travel agent each summer just to plan ahead.

It’s wise advice.

If LSU is in the neighborhood, or just scheduled to make an appearance in your region, you’ve got a fair chance of having a run on bottled water.

And, in a related what-couldpossibly-go-wrong? development, Les Miles on Tuesday was officially hired by Fox Sports as a college football analyst.

But we’ll stick to one disasterwaiting-to happen at a time here.

They have even taken to naming the hurricanes after LSU mascots’ maiden names. Harvey the Tiger became Mike VII just in time to establish a plausible alibi and not be implicated in the latest fiasco.

That, of course, would be having to move the LSU-BYU game from Houston to New Orleans in the midst of biblical flooding.

So, of course, no sooner had the announcement come than it appeared that Harvey and its remnants grew weary of pounding Houston and turned its attention to New Orleans. It’s leaving its options open for torrential downpours on a city that floods if you spit in the street.

Several cities were apparently vying to catch LSU-BYU on the rebound, all of them cities that maybe would have been wise to look the other way.

These “weather events” apparently will follow LSU anywhere these days.

The Houston organizers could have shipped the game to Topeka and, with LSU involved, surely inland Kansas suddenly would have been hit by a Delaware-sized swarm of locusts.

The Tigers may be just scratching the surface. There are still plenty of the Ten Plagues of Egypt still begging to disrupt football, including frogs and lice and a particularly gross-sounding battle with boils.

It’s a fairly recent development.

A little research, dating to 1893, turned up that LSU played its first 1,013 games — many without helmets, some with handlebar mustaches — with only one game affected by nasty weather. Hurricane Hilda in 1963 forced a home game with Florida to be pushed from October to after the regular season in December.

That means that back in the good old days you had (I’ve got a calculator) only a one in 1,013 chance of showing up and having to flee the premises, or roughly a 0.0000897-percent chance of having to scramble.

You’d take those odds, order season tickets and even spring for the parking pass.

Then Nick Saban left — or, in retrospect, “evacuated” — Baton Rouge.

Since then, LSU has played 220 games and No. 221 on Saturday in New Orleans (hopefully) will be the ninth that turned into one big hassle just to get staged without assistance from the national guard.

Thus the odds now are just 0.04072 percent that you’ll have to bail the field before playing.

So you’ve got your choice. You can either blame Saban for leaving (the feel-good reaction) or Miles for coming (the knee-jerk reaction).

It took Miles three tries to get his first home game in, and even it was delayed two extra days due to Hurricane Rita.

It’s been stormy weather ever since.

And to think, LSU once coined the popular phrase, “It never rains in Tiger Stadium on Saturday night.”

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.com