LSU leaders finally evolving

Published 6:00 pm Monday, October 16, 2017

BATON ROUGE — So here I sit   all ready to pen a stirring sermon on the evils of assuming a football game is over, of giving up and heading for the exits just because things are bleak and it looks like a proverbial lost cause.

It promises to be uplifting. There was quite a life’s lesson for all of us in Tiger Stadium Saturday by some never-say-never LSU Tigers who defied some considerable odds to rally from 20 points down and somehow, some way beat Auburn 27-23.

Call it football as a reminder for all of us. I expect coaches to request copies just for those awkward moments when the breaks are going against the boys. 

I’ll probably go with something really clever like, “It Ain’t Over ’til it’s Over.”

Oh, but first I need to turn off this Saints game on the TV. 

Still third quarter, but no need, really, to watch this anymore. The Who Dats seem to have things well in hand against the near-comical Lions. Maybe check the final score later and … 

Hold on.

Maybe watch another series or two.

Well, this is interesting.

What the …

Really?

Huh?

That can’t be legal.

Nothing else seems to be in this flag fest.

Are you kidding me?

The Saints are really going to get beat in football by a hanging-on-the-rim technical?

Who knew?

The Lions seemed to have called LSU’s 20-point deficit and raised them 35.

The Saints seemed to have checked the Auburn second half game plan and decreed … Hold my beer and watch this.

Sorry, but there will be a brief delay here while we try to interpret the NFL.

(Pregnant pause).

OK.

Well, that was different.

Whew. Saints win. Somehow. I think. The jury is still out. They could still be sorting out yellow laundry.

Not sure what happened. Film at 11, perhaps.

Anyway, back to our regularly scheduled columnizing.

As I was saying, I don’t know what more people could possibly expect out of Ed Orgeron at LSU right now.

Maybe he will always be too cuddly, too much of a Hollywood caricature of the Bayou Cajun head coach, to get the kind of credit the geniuses like Saban and Meyer and Dabo do. They talk normal, too, which, no doubt, helps.

No one is suggesting that Orgeron belongs on that Coaching Rushmore. Granted, his hiring is still a gamble with the jury still watching every move.

But make no mistake about it. The last two weeks with Orgeron have been head coaching at its finest.

You think that was easy?

It wasn’t.

No, it doesn’t erase the fact that LSU still, at last check, lost to Troy.

And I still would suggest that hanging in with grit and guile to beat Florida and following it up with the mother of all LSU comebacks against Auburn doesn’t happen without that puzzling embarrassment.

But that’s when head coaches earn the big bucks. Half the job sometimes seems to be crisis management of some form or flavor.

Oh, for sure, he has help.

LSU employs rock star coordinators, X-and-O wizards that it pays accordingly, as part of the master plan. 

Matt Canada has had to figure out a way to get blood from a turnip, aka, points and yards from an offense with minimal input from a baby-faced offensive line. It’s unconventional. The fool contraption keeps letting wide receivers lead the Tigers in rushing, but … whatever works.

Dave Aranda, the defensive mad scientist, had to jiggle some assignments and adjust the right levers on his bunch. All they needed Saturday was a defense that had just given up 290 yards in the first half to dial up something that might hold Auburn to just 64 in the second.

Most of it is probably technical football way over any of our civilian heads. That’s their job.

Orgeron let them do it.

That’s half the battle. In a way, it  was the easy part.

But somebody -— the head coach’s job — had to convince the young, surely frustrated Tigers that a 20-point comeback was doable, even while they watched their own fans streaming out of the stadium (he even had the diplomacy to thank the crowd afterwards).

A sideline huddle or quick halftime speech wasn’t going to do it. That groundwork had to be put down in advance.

In the gloaming following Troy, however, Orgeron has somehow fashioned a real team.

At that point, it was a fragile team that could have gone either way.

But he got them to respond to him,  to believe in each other, to connect to a staff that he also had to make sure stayed on the same page amid all the grumbling.

Leadership, sorely lacking pre-Troy, has had to be developed on the fly, but it’s suddenly evolving.

Scattered outbreaks of confidence are even starting to creep in.

The word for it is “chemistry,” and it’s as important — and often far more elusive — than any of those fancy Xs and Os.

Getting a team to play as hard and gritty as Orgeron has the last two weeks is half the battle for a head coach. It makes up for a lot of flaws, of which the Tigers still have many.

So give Orgeron some credit.

By the way, I still don’t know what the Saints and Lions were doing.

But I’m pretty sure it will never replace football.