As is customary in these dire situations, there’s probably plenty of blame to go around with LSU’s 1-2 start to a season that, even with the gutting of last year’s national championship team, was carefully designed to be 3-0 going into a game at Florida.

Welcome to 2020. Again. Where nothing seems to be working out.

The game at Florida last week, which figured to be an ugly affair for the Tigers’ “Lost in Space” defense, wasn’t played after the Gators got hit with a coronavirus spike a few days before kickoff.

Probably just as well for LSU, as the Tigers’ defense’s heads were still spinning from the circles Missouri had just run around them.

Maybe the extra week off will alleviate that.

But, anyway, right now, we can say that COVID-19 is the best thing that has happened to the Tigers this season.

Vanderbilt doesn’t count.

For now head coach Ed Orgeron, as per his custom, is falling on his sword and blaming it all on the coaches.

That probably oversimplifies things, but I’m sure it works for the knee-jerk fans and most of the more discerning think tanks on social media.

“I told them ‘We got to coach them better, you guys stay together,’ ” Orgeron said Monday.

Also: “It’s not how much we (coaches) know, it’s how much they know. They’ve got to be able to do it on the field.”

Orgeron has promised to get things turned around. He’s done it before, even when the times looked most bleak, such as losing to Troy in his first full year on the job in 2017 and bouncing back with a win at Florida that turned the season around.

We’ll see.

But if fans are looking to point fingers — a favorite pastime at even the first hint of trouble — this is just way too easy.

Never mind all the on-field personnel losses from a year ago.

Orgeron also had to replace two coaches in the offseason — and right now both new defensive coordinator Bo Pelini and “passing game coordinator” Scott Linehan are bombing big time.

All eyes will be on them when South Carolina arrives in Baton Rouge Saturday to see if LSU can recover and salvage something or just punt on the whole nutty season.

Pelini is getting most of the attention (blame), even though he did pretty well shut down winless Vanderbilt in its tracks.

He’s bringing back those scary Halloween-like images of Lou Tepper’s reign of terror in the late 1990s, confusing his wards with lack of communication instead of the paralysis by analysis that Tepper traded in.

Remember back in the extended summer when Orgeron said the defense was way ahead of where last year’s was at any time?

He didn’t see this “Little Shop of Horrors” coming, which he described as “mistakes, communication, not filling the right gap, not aligning, not making the proper calls, guys running wide open down the field …”

Mostly: “Us shooting ourselves in the foot.”

It got so bad that in Orgeron’s vow to simplify things he was reduced to saying that he’d rather just run “one defense and one coverage” if that’s what it took to run it right.

So far, however, the more aggressive style promised Orgeron salivated over when Pelini was hired has mostly been in full-blown chase mode.

Getting that fixed is Job 1.

But Linehan will get scrutiny, too.

He was brought in to fill the trendy new glamour spot on the Tigers’ staff, a role made fashionable last year by the wunderkind, Joe Brady. Steve Ensminger still calls the plays, but in this age of specialization the main job of the “passing game coordinator” is third downs and the red zone.

So let’s check and review those Missouri stats.

Somehow LSU managed to roll up 430 yards passing, even while converting exactly 0-for-10 on third-downs, some of which might have come in handy when trying to keep Missouri’s previously nondescript offense away from the Tigers’ befuddled defense.

And yet LSU still wins that game in the final minute — in the red zone — if the Tigers could have scored with four tries from the 1-yard line.

That’s not exactly true.

The officials marked the ball on the 1-yard line, right there cozy with the goal line, but when you run four plays from the shotgun formation, it’s an unforced error to move it back and actually start your four plays from the 6-yard line or thereabouts.

Missouri coach Eliah Drinkwitz even said a day later how relieved he was that the Tigers didn’t try, oh, maybe a quarterback sneak, since he was already running short on defensive linemen at the end of the game.

Who knows? Maybe he sent Linehan a gift basket for the favor.

So far Orgeron is standing by his new coaches.

But after a week to regroup and rethink, he and the fan base are going to want to see to a pretty substantial turnaround this week.

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