Scooter Hobbs

Good one, LSU.

And not just for its own rabid fan base.

No, in these trying times, in this dour world gone totally pandemic, we could all use a little levity.

This whole 2020 debacle has become way too serious, decidedly too somber, entirely too vaccine-on-a-carrot dependent.

We all need a break.

So dang if the Tigers didn’t step up to the plate.

The moment really needed a drum roll. More fanfare, perhaps some pomp and scattered circumstance.

Or a mic drop.

But, anyway, LSU announced Wednesday that it was self-isolating from the holiday bowl season.

I believe they called it a self-imposed ban.

It sent tremors — the good kind — rumbling throughout the college football landscape.

The state and national reaction: ROTFL (that’d be Rolling On The Floor Laughing for the text-message illiterates).

It’s probably defensive coordinator Bo Pelini’s fault.

But, thanks, Tigers, we all needed that.

Some even saw it as a public service announcement — a headline-grabbing comical reminder that LSU, at 3-5, was 100 percent, certifiably bowl eligible, just like every other team that managed to field a varsity in these disjointed times.

With their name and brand recognition, the Tigers might even have finagled their way into the Big Ten championship game.

But, no, just to clarify: LSU’s self-imposed bowl ban wasn’t denying itself something it couldn’t have anyway.

Everybody can get a trophy this nutty year, or at least a 50-50 shot of getting some bowl hardware.

There was even idle talk of some bowl committee getting the old band back together to renew the long-dead LSU-Tulane series, somewhere nice and toasty like Fort Worth or Birmingham, maybe Boise.

That will now probably have to wait for a pandemic to be named later.

Like all great comedy, LSU gets extra points for keeping a straight face during this whole routine. You don’t want to telegraph the punch line.

Athletic Director Scott Woodward even set it up perfectly when, as recently as Sunday, he was on the radio talking about how LSU would be bowling.

So, with as perfect a timing as a typed-up official release from the university can produce — you could almost feel the somber inflections between the lines — there was head coach Ed Orgeron, right on cue (in a school-issued news release):

“I share the disappointment of our student-athletes who will not be able to compete this season in a bowl game.”

As a finishing flourish, he even added his trademark “Geaux Tigers.”

Just not to a bowl.

Next up: LSU will announce that, in lieu of a bowl game, it is banding together to treat this week’s Florida game as its “Bowl Game.”

Well, it is, after all, in Florida.

At last look the Tigers were 24-point underdogs heading to Gainesville.

So if this week doesn’t work out — and it won’t — then they can always shift gears, pass their COVID-19 tests, and declare next week’s Ole Miss game as their bowl game.

In some (unrefined) circles (mostly in Mississippi) for some vague reason it’s already referred to as the “Magnolia Bowl.”

So LSU has made the ultimate sacrifice and, no matter the entertainment value, outsiders have been skeptical of the whole charade.

Maybe it all went right over social media’s heads — like most of what has been thrown at LSU’s secondary this season.

The social media wits wonder if LSU isn’t a couple or three more opt-outs from not being able to get a quorum for any postgame festivities.

Even if it could, would they be interested?

And, well … there’s that LSU secondary, still Lost in Space at the tail end of the season. The defense would probably end up lining up in a different bowl than the rest of the team anyway.

LSU had to know it would be the life of Wednesday’s party. The one-liners came too easy.

But perhaps there was an alternative motive hidden between the grins and giggles.

In fact, some astute message boards wondered if the Tigers, in so many words, weren’t trying to get ahead of an NCAA investigation with more self-imposed “penalties’ that might appease the infractions committee.

In fact, LSU’s release used pretty much those words — “LSU leadership made this decision after careful deliberation and review of the NCAA rules violations that have been discovered in the University’s cooperative investigation with the NCAA.”

Any laughs the rest of the country got out of it was purely coincidental.

And what better year to ban yourself from the bowl fun than 2020? What are those poor players going to miss other than a few more virtual calls?

So it’s worth a try. No harm done.

Of course, the NCAA could very well reply, to put it in terms Louisiana will understand, that LSU’s “sacrifice” is a lot like giving up broccoli for Lent.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.comScooter Hobbs, American Press

American Press