Orgeron: ‘This is going to be a turning point for us’

Published 6:00 pm Tuesday, September 19, 2017

BATON ROUGE — On Monday LSU started picking up the pieces from Saturday’s “embarrassing” 37-7 loss to Mississippi State.

“I think they played about as good as they can and we played about as bad as we can,” head coach Ed Orgeron admitted. “That was obvious.”

A number of players said right after the shellacking that the game was embarrassing, and Orgeron said  many of them skipped their day off to come in and look at film on their own Sunday.

The Tigers tumbled from No. 12 to the bottom of the AP poll at No. 25 and No. 23 in the coaches’ poll.

But Orgeron was looking on the bright side.

“I do believe this is going to be a turning point for us,” he said. “It better be.”

In retrospect, Orgeron said he should have known early in the week that things might not go as planned.

“Our team periods Tuesday and Wednesday were not as sharp as they needed to be. We learned a lesson. We did not prepare as well as we should have.

“We did not play well. It’s my responsibility. I think it’s good that they’re angry. The coaches are angry. We’re angry at ourselves. We could have coached better. 

“Those guys (Mississippi State) were on fire.”

For most of it, LSU was a dumpster fire.

Orgeron went through a laundry list of the obvious, from a third straight week of way too many penalties to dropped passes to missed assignments on defense, misreads on offense.

The guilty were to do some extra running Monday for the penalties, but Orgeron refuted the popular explanation that the Tigers were an undisciplined team.

“We think we’re more disciplined now than we’ve been in the past,” he said. “But obviously the penalties are not showing it. It’s an area that we need improvement, and I’m sure were going to do it.”

LSU’s penalties cost the Tigers two touchdowns that were called back, and third-down defensive infractions extended at least two Mississippi State scoring drives.

“We just can’t have that,” Orgeron said.

But it was at least partly discipline that led to some of the defensive breakdowns, as Orgeron blamed many on eye discipline in the secondary on play action.

Up front, where at times LSU seemed to be getting manhandled, Orgeron said, “We played pretty good between the tackles. There were a lot of runs outside the tackles that affected us. We got cut a lot on the perimeter … Option responsibilities create big holes. I think we can shore up the things that were broken. It wasn’t as much a physical thing as it was alignment, assignment, technique.”

Offensively, LSU’s woes were pretty simple — a lot of dropped passes, some bad missed passes by quarterback Danny Etling.

Orgeron credited a lot of that to pressure by Mississippi State  — nine pressures to go with one sack — which had been nonexistent against Etling in the first two games.

“That affected the throws,” he said. “We dropped some balls, one that was for a touchdown. We didn’t hit some passes, had a lot of one-on-one (situations)  that we didn’t catch the ball or the ball wasn’t on the money like they have been the first two games.”