WKU sticks to LSU like game’s mud

Published 12:55 pm Sunday, October 25, 2015

BATON ROUGE — On the one hand, with a miserable night like Saturday, you just want to get out of the rain and the muck and the mire with a victory.

On the other hand, gosh, was that ever ugly.

No other way to put it.

No harm done, of course. 

It even turned out semi-presentable, at least on the scoreboard, where LSU won 48-20, though danged if I can remember all of those points. 

Most of the fans who sat through the steady rain showers of the entire first half promptly went home at halftime, perhaps to get away from a relatively dry second half.

“Early on the weather conditions were terrible,” LSU coach Les Miles said. “If it had stayed that way nobody wold have had any success throwing. I kind of enjoyed the second half.”

At times, though, the Tigers seemed annoyed that Western Kentucky wouldn’t just go away quietly and let LSU turn its attention to Alabama in two weeks following an open date.

Any time the Tigers are slow-walking back to the huddle, you can pretty well figure it’s not a conference game or anything else of particular importance.

It was going to be tough for LSU to get its game spit-shined and buffed up for the Tide under such sloppy conditions.

Or maybe the Tigers have big plans for open date this week.

At any rate, maybe this one shouldn’t be examined with too fine of a microscope.

True, it’s doubtful that anything that happened in this slop scared Alabama much — and maybe that was the plan.

Probably not.

But LSU is far enough into the season where style points aren’t really important anymore, especially on a yucky, miserably get-it-over-with night like Saturday.

It can skewer elections, we’re told, and doesn’t do much for football aesthetics either. 

Leonard Fournette had a rather mundane 150 yards, as it continues to be more and more evident that the defensive game plan against him is to send all available hands his way.

On the positive, while it was a pedestrian Fournette performance, Brandon Harris continues to put the Tigers’ quarterback nightmare further in the rearview mirror.

“He’s doing exactly what we want him to do,” said Miles, which for the third straight week was a career-high, this time 286 yards and three touchdowns and not a single turnover.

“I think we’re throwing the ball better,” Miles said. “Brandon can really throw it and our receivers are catching it.”

It was all the more impressive Saturday since the Tigers only briefly looked to get in any rhythm.

But, for this game, was there nothing that could wake these Tigers up?

Can they, at some point, bring along a knockout punch for one of these affairs?

LSU’s first touchdown looked almost too easy — Malachi Dupre’s 55-yard catch from Harris — and the Tigers spent almost the rest of the half spinning their wheels before finally stumbling into the end zone just before the half to salvage a mere 14-7 lead.

The knockout finally came, but it was almost by default in the fourth quarter after the Hilltoppers had finally run out of bullets.

Western Kentucky kept firing them all — 61 forward passes before the chambers finally ran completely empty in the final minute.

The Tigers, at the least, managed to keep them at arm’s length for the entire 60 minutes.

The game had a chance to get dicey at times, but nothing too scary for LSU.

Well?

Maybe it wasn’t even as dominant as the final score suggests.

But I’m for giving Western Kentucky some credit. Quarterback Brandon Doughty was the real deal — not only SEC caliber, as advertised, but by all reports NFL-bound as well.

We’ll leave that to Mel Kiper to decide.

But more so, he had some receivers that any SEC school would trade head up for. A whole covey of them.

The Tigers’ secondary continued to be plagued by the occasional busted coverage, but give the Hilltoppers credit for making a lot of catches in tight coverage too.

But in this day and age, holding that team to 20 points wasn’t bad, probably more impressive than giving up 24 to South Carolina and certainly a better night than giving up 24 to Syracuse, and don’t even bring up the 22 to Eastern Michigan.

Gloss over lightly the notion that Western Kentucky ended up with 428 yards and 24 first downs.

The Hilltoppers looked like an offense that could give most anybody trouble and, if you throw 61 passes, some of them are bound to do some damage.

“We’re not there yet,” Miles said. “Hopefully in a couple of weeks. We can relax, get healthy and get back in our conference,” Miles said.

What he meant, of course, was get ready for Alabama.