Scooter Hobbs

As decent society continues to vaccinate and the world begins to loosen up a tad, you have to take the good with the bad.

Case in point: LSU will play its spring football game on Saturday.

That’s not one of the good things, mainly because it’s a spring football game and it means diddly.

But it’s something.

Real spring football was not as much fun as I thought it would be even in the case of a McNeese, in which the pandemic season begat spring games that counted.

LSU is doing the traditional exhibition, a day to go public and a pass out a lot of participation trophies while showcasing what the Tigers learned while the real work was going on behind closed doors for 14 workouts.

Not a good thing. Not really even football.

Masks will still be required, of course, and fans probably ought to take their temperature. We’re not quite there yet.

But on the positive side, unlike some schools, LSU and its fan base have never had any trouble social-distancing the spring game, generally self-imposing sparse crowds, if they can be called that.

So there’s not much danger that LSU will jump the gun on the “all-clear” horn for a return to the Old Normal.

We know what this looks like. It looks a lot like Tiger Stadium last fall during the semi-quarantine, and in that case New Normal Tiger Stadium bears no more relation to Old Normal Tiger Stadium that LSU’s 5-5 record did to the previous year’s national championship.

But, unless the skies open up and they decide to junk the whole thing, LSU will go through (the motions) with it Saturday.

Ordinarily I might say there should be a lot to watch for.

I will most likely try to make some sense of it, or at least fake it, watching it unfold Saturday. I might even take notes.

But I should know better.

For those who maintain nothing good came of the pandemic, I’ll remind you that LSU did not have a spring game last year.

The last time LSU had one was the spring of 2019.

Ring a bell?

There should have been some hint that day, maybe a five-alarm alert, that foretold 15-0, a Heisman Trophy, Joe Brady and a dominant national championship run with the dad-gumdest offense anybody ever saw.

I remember seeing nothing of the sort foretold. I remember it looking like any other spring game you ever saw.

LSU threw deep a lot that day, but the spring game always kind of devolves into that — even in the dark and up-the-middle ages — with a lot of oohs and aahs and mostly near misses on the other end.

There was enough new stuff there, often five wide receivers at a time, to prove Ed Orgeron’s vows to modernize his offense were not idle threats.

Still, although it evolved into something special the next fall, you couldn’t have foretold it from the spring game.

So what about this year, you ask?

Well, once again Orgeron has warned in advance that, despite being verily impressed with the progress on all fronts, he regrets that he will follow spring tradition and keep things “vanilla.”

Also, any player with a hangnail ­— defined as “most anyone you might want to see” — will sit out the festivities.

That’s the pre-pandemic version of “abundance of caution” at work again.

Otherwise, as a general rule of thumb football etiquette does not allow for a “breakout game” in the spring silliness. Those things are reserved for the fall.

So take the easy route and decide for yourself if these rumors of a legitimate quarterback competition are for real.

The twist is that it may not be the desperate process of elimination common from the days before Joe Burrow.

It’s viewed as one of the SEC’s strongest quarterback rooms and no guarantee that Myles Brennan is handed his job back after missing the final seven games with an injury. Both T.J. Finley and Max Johnson had their moments in his stead, particularly Johnson in winning the last two games, and Orgeron has given early enrollee Garrett Nussmeier more than a pat on the head during drills.

Spoiler alert: Orgeron will say it’s too close to call a starter yet and will decide to let it carry over into August.

But form your opinion early.

I do have one suggestion: Instead of the traditional coin toss, let one player from each squad meet at midfield pregame and whichever one can throw tight end Cole Taylor’s shoe the farthest wins the choice to kick or defer.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.comScooter Hobbs updated