Fox play-by-play announcer Tim Brando, a Shreveport native who got his big break in television while working for a local station in Baton Rouge, remembers how excited he was to be returning to his old haunts to call an LSU game.

Brought the family down, the whole works, to be back among some old friends and viewers who knew him well.

“So we’re walking up, across the parking lot,” Brando laughed, “and LSU fans were screaming, ‘Brando! Get out of here! We don’t want you here!’ ”

“Not at this hour!” another fan would chime in.

It was nothing personal.

It was just way too early to suit Tigers fans and the birthright of their tailgating habits.

That was back in the days when the mere mention of the words Jefferson-Pilot sent shockwaves down Tigers fans’ spines. What it actually meant was the dreaded reality of morning football.

It will rear its sleepy head again Saturday when No. 8 Tennessee visits the No. 25 Tigers.

Oh, the horrors.

The networks have changed over the years, the kickoff times ramped up even earlier, from 11:30 a.m. to 11 a.m.

But the LSU fan reaction has remained the same.

They don’t like it. Tiger Stadium just isn’t the same at that hour. Too much traffic arriving too late for an early kick. Not enough time for fans to mingle and relax and to drink their game faces on.

Never mind that — little known fact — LSU is 8-0 this century in pre-noon kickoffs at home in Tiger Stadium. And six of them were Southeastern Conference games.

LSU still doesn’t cotton to the thought.

First-year head coach Brian Kelly is new to the crisis. But he’s heard enough this week to go into full Greco-Roman begging and pleading, a call to arms urging his fans to get up early and make the game some semblance of Saturday Night in Tiger Stadium.

“Come out early and get going,” he said. “It’s Tiger Stadium. It’s LSU football. If you’re not excited for that, I don’t know what gets you going in October.

“There’s time to do other things, but LSU playing Tennessee in Tiger Stadium, tell me what else is better to do. It’s an awesome opportunity.”

He’s the latest in a long line coaches trying to sell 11 a.m. to a skeptical fan base.

LSU fans have come to grips with sunlit 2:30 p.m. kickoffs being the price of being good.

That changed, to a degree, in 2003 when LSU joined the national discussion with a thrilling 17-10 victory over No. 7 Georgia. It was the first hint that that team might win the national championship — and it showed that Tiger Stadium could rock and roll before the sun went down.

But 11 a.m. is still stretching it.

Maybe LSU and its fandom better get used to it.

The early kickoffs used to carry the added stigma that if you’re playing at that ungodly hour, your game doesn’t mean much. It was a convenient spot to stick the throwaway games.

Long before the Longhorn Network was a thing, Jefferson-Pilot’s SEC coverage used to be jokingly referred to as “The Vanderbilt Network.”

But more and more, Brando has observed, the networks are putting real value on the 11 a.m. time slots for bigger games.

Two words: Good ratings.

You can partly blame another Louisiana native, Michael Mulvihill of New Orleans.

He has a long title with Fox Sports but basically is a VP of programming with a penchant for computer-driven metrics and analytics.

He found that the 2:30 p.m. time slot didn’t always make sense for Fox’s Big 12 and Big Ten games. Not only did it mean butting heads with the SEC’s game in that slot, it seemed most of the week’s better games tended the bunch up there. No matter how good your game was, Brando said, ratings could get watered down by so much competition.

Fox started doling out some of its games at 11 a.m. Last year, Brando said, Fox’s morning kickoffs were the No. 1-rated overall time slot for college football. It was the first time the SEC on CBS at 2:30 p.m. hadn’t prevailed.

Others have noticed.

It may be the wave of the future … and more and more of a challenge for Tiger Stadium.