Finding the true meaning to LSU’s bowl season

Published 9:40 am Sunday, December 27, 2015

LSU arrived in Houston on Saturday, a day after Texas Tech, perhaps waiting to check one last time to see if a ready-made quarterback showed up under the Christmas tree wrapped in purple and gold.

Hard to get a read on what kind of game mood the Tigers are in yet.

But the Tigers really need to bring their “A” game.

Don’t let the holiday alarmists fool you. Bowl games, no matter how many there are or how comical some of the corporate-gerrymandered official names are, really do matter.

Even when it’s not the playoffs or even the Sugar Bowl, they matter.

They matter for LSU.

This one, in particular, this Advocare V100 Texas Bowl is one LSU really needs to take care of against Texas Tech.

It’s not a bad deal, really.

If the Tigers are going to be slightly off the bowl season’s beaten path, Houston is a perfect spot for LSU

It’s a quick trip convenient for fans, many of whom already live there. It’s like right next door.

LSU needs to act like it.

This game really matters, even though it appears a lot of people forgot the Tigers were indeed even going bowling.

It’s like the November struggles and then the confusing end of the regular season almost wore everybody out.

There was just too much drama with the whole Les Miles saga, the two-week soap opera that came to that shocking conclusion.

Remember the last time we saw Uncle Les?

He was being carried off the field on his players’ shoulders, a bit awkwardly perhaps, and not because LSU had just beaten Texas A&M for the fifth straight time.

Those photo ops were under the premise that he was being carted off into the sunset, taking one last victory lap in Tiger Stadium.

There was the surprise ending moments later, of course, with Miles coming out the other side having used up another of his nine lives but still on board as LSU’s head coach.

The attempted coup, never well conceived, failed miserably.

Everybody was caught up in the moment then, with mega-goodwill toward Les hitting somewhat syrupy proportions well in advance of the holiday season.

From both near and afar, it was deemed to be a good thing.

Now, the reality.

Miles is still the head coach at LSU. And he still needs to win some football games. That part hasn’t changed.

This one would be a good place to start.

This game does matter.

Who knows. If things go awry, athletic director Joe Alleva and the merry band of LSU power brokers might convene another emergency third-quarter pow-wow and change their minds again.

Probably not.

But if the reaction to the late-season shenanigans showed anything, it’s how much Miles means to the players he coaches.

When those players thought he had coached them for the last time, the postgame love and affection was genuine.

It’s up to them now to show that it was the right move.

True, this is only one game. It won’t make November’s three-game losing streak go away.

But Miles, who won his first four bowls at LSU — and by an average of 28 points per game — has now lost three of his last four, two via field goals on the final play of the game.

If the reprieve Miles got — which was fueled mostly by public opinion — is to have legs LSU needs to get back to those early Miles holiday trips.

Win Tuesday night, and everybody is ready to move forward with Miles 2.0.

Lay an egg in Houston and all of sudden the speculation is that the Tigers just delayed the inevitable and are headed to another November of job speculation.

This year’s LSU bunch, as constructed, was always a team that seemed probably a year away.

Win late Tuesday night — even better, win convincingly or at least crisply — and there’s an offseason of redemption with high hopes for next year.

It is a young team, and it doesn’t appear the NFL will take its usual ravenous chunk out of the junior class.

There’s precedent.

The 2007 national championship team served notice with a 41-14 thumping of Notre Dame in the previous year’s Sugar Bowl.

That 2006 team was probably the best LSU team that didn’t play for the national championship — and it had served notice to end the previous season with a 41-3 rout of Miami.

The 2011 team — the Tigers did go 13-0 before the BCS belly-flop — gave you a sneak peak with a 41-24 win over Texas A&M in the Cotton Bowl that was more dominating than the final score.

Mainly LSU, at some point, has to do something to refute the notion that it lost its mojo and hasn’t really been the same since that still unexplainable bowl performance for the BCS championship against Alabama in January of 2012.

Tuesday night won’t quite do that. Texas Tech, dangerous as the Red Raiders are, isn’t even ranked.

But it would be a start.