Stockpile wins any old way you can

Published 7:00 pm Monday, November 20, 2017

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — “I assume they’re going to fix that.”

We were staring down at the goal posts at Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium just before pregame warmups were to begin. A few players had already straggled out for a look-see before the casual stretching began.

Something sure didn’t seem right.

“That’s not normal, huh?”

No. Pretty sure the goal posts aren’t supposed to be tilted at a 45-degree angle, although these days it probably wouldn’t hurt LSU’s kicking game to have that option.

Maybe in the old XFL they’d have experimented with it, but the SEC is pretty old school.

“The wind did that?”

Sure did.

Not to worry. Tennessee got its maintenance people on the case and, level in hand, they had everything back to copacetic directly (not that it helped LSU’s placekicking much).

“Well, that was different.”

Oh, but it was just getting started.

Occasionally LSU and Tennessee tried to sneak in some honest football during a night when Mother Nature had decided to be the star.

But most of the attempts seemed unintentional while LSU was fashioning a strange 30-10 victory.

I did get to wondering on occasion how fast a wind-blown paper cup would have to get wind blown in order to really injure somebody.

Then a metal piece of one of the scoreboards did get blown off its mountings.

You’d look down and all four of the little wind flags on the two goal posts were blowing in a different direction.

“This is crazy wind.”

But then came halftime … and the gates of meteorological hell were opened full throttle on innocent Tennessee marching band members.

Nobody could see them braving whirling, whipping sheets of jet-propelled solid water.

And that was before about a third of the stadium lights went out.

Then came the locusts, the frogs, the … OK, no locusts and frogs.

But wait?

They’re going to start the second half in this … right now?

It was hard not to have a “Caddyshack” flashback — “I don’t think the heavy stuff is going to come down for quite a while.”

So, lights, camera, action … the game just goes on.

LSU coach Ed Orgeron made the best of it, kept talking about how it was like “little kids playing in the backyard.”

That must have been some crazy backyard.

In truth, he probably just wanted to get out of Knoxville with any kind of win before one of the Smoky Mountains went volcano on everybody and started spewing lava all over the place.

 “It wasn’t pretty and we didn’t play our best ball, but we found a way to win,” Orgeron said in one of the season’s great understatements.

If there was any beauty to LSU’s performance — OK, there wasn’t — then that was it.

It certainly didn’t seem like 30-10 worth of domination, particularly against a Tennessee team that still hasn’t won a conference game.

And who knows what might have happened if the Vols weren’t so giving.

If the Vols weren’t giving LSU 10 points on two muffed punts, they were turning the ball over on downs at their own 21 with a foolish fourth-down gamble that set up another point-blank drive.

LSU struggled to run until the fourth quarter and the secondary got burned just enough to keep Tennessee hanging around longer than it should have.

LSU’s two most impressive drives ended with missed field goals, although one grinded up most of the fourth quarter clock and ended all doubt.

So it wasn’t a victory that really did much to move the meter.

But that’s OK.

If you get to November and you don’t have the nosy College Football Playoff committee constantly looking over your shoulder — and a loss to Troy will generally eliminate that threat —then you don’t really have to worry about style points.

So what if it’s not pretty.

You just stockpile wins any old way you can.

Orgeron admitted that the Tigers didn’t really want to throw with those tricky wind patterns and if Tennessee was intent on stacking the line of scrimmage against the run, then LSU would just have to be better at it.

Of course it took away most of the bells and whistles from offensive coordinator Matt Canada’s play toy.

Sometimes you do what you gotta do.

Tennessee may have handed LSU the game early, but the only way the Tigers were going to lose was to hand it back to them.

“The weather conditions changed the whole game plan,” running back Derrius Guice said. “The way they were playing, they had about eight or nine in the box every time and safeties were about five-yards deep. You just had to grind it out and get what you can.”

It was no time to get fancy.

The Tigers didn’t. They weren’t being stubborn. They were being smart, going into survival mode.

So if it wasn’t the most artistic victory of the season, no apologies were needed.

Just head for cover.