So here it is, the post-Thanksgiving football feast, and all across the thankful landscape you find equal parts electricity and anxiety in the fall air.

Yes, it’s time to strap on some good old-fashioned hatred, embrace bitterness and let pettiness run wild.

It is, of course, “Rivalry Week,” when fear and loathing runs amuck and records are famously thrown out the window. There are Border Wars galore with instate bitterness on the loose. It gets to the point that even families who survived Turkey Day relatively intact are often torn asunder, split by rooting interests and silly feuds, some of them dating back centuries.

It’s Old Oaken Buckets, a glut of Cups and Bells, even something called a Jeweled Shillelagh, which I’m obliged to inform you, via Google, is a combination “walking stick” and “dueling weapon” that Notre Dame and Southern Cal will bicker over.

And it would not be a decent Turkey Weekend without Ole Miss and Mississippi State ignoring records, but mostly throwing any semblance of sportsmanship out that window while fighting over some sort of Egg.

Hate your neighbor, taunt your familiar foe.

Meanwhile, LSU is playing a team that will be making its first-ever trip to Tiger Stadium.

It almost makes you appreciate The Golden Boot, doesn’t it? Almost, I said.

But the Tigers have been left at the rivalry altar once again.

Oklahoma, I guess it is this time. Big-time program, of course. A brand name, for sure, with seven national championships and seven more Heisman Trophies.

Maybe this is the Southeastern Conference’s matchmakers’ latest attempt to get LSU is a proper, end-of-the-season blood rival.

Arkansas never really got legs in spite of (or maybe because of) The Boot. Texas A&M was showing promise, but the Aggies have Texas, and nothing will ever replace that for them.

So now it’s LSU-Oklahoma, OU to good friends.

We don’t even know if this latest “rivalry” is meant to be permanent.

The SEC is still sorting out the scheduling challenges now that the 16-team league is as bloated as your Uncle Moe was after Thursday’s dessert.

We’ll see.

But, for now, LSU and Oklahoma will close the season in Baton Rouge, with the Tigers making the trip to Norman next year.

Oklahoma might not even recognize the Tigers as for the sixth time this season — half the schedule — LSU will wear “alternate” uniforms. Purple jerseys this time, but I’m tired of wailing about that and apparently no one in LSU’s School of Fashion listens to calm reason anyway so the Tigers will again, for no explainable reason, forsake tradition and dress like gridiron clowns while some of the sharpest unis in college football gather mold in the equipment room.

But, anyway, this will be the fourth all-time meeting between the two.

LSU got caught spying on Oklahoma practices before the 1949 Sugar Bowl, a ham-fisted attempt at espionage that didn’t help the Tigers much when the Bud Wilkinson-coached Sooners romped 35-0 in the ball game.

Otherwise, it’s far better memories for the Tigers.

There was the 21-14 LSU win in New Orleans, a game that didn’t seem that close, but won the 2003 Bowl Championship Series national title.

Fast-forward to Atlanta in 2019, and you had one of the biggest mismatches of the College Football Playoff era when Joe Burrow threw a touchdown pass roughly every 15 or 20 seconds in the Tigers’ 63-28 pass-over in the Peach Bowl semifinal.

Otherwise, there’s not much history there or much familiarity.

They do have some mascot mischief in common.

LSU is still trying to recover from this season’s Omar the Tiger fiasco, the awkward attempt to bring a stray tiger into Tiger Stadium while the regal Mike the Tiger was right across the street in his habitat across the street.

Oklahoma once had a dog for a mascot, also originally a stray, but that did not end well. “Mex,” as he was called, wore a red sweater to the games and his job description was to shoo away any other stray dogs from the field.

Controversy arose in 1924 when, somehow, Mex got lost while the team was boarding a train in Kansas and the media, eagle-eyed as ever, blamed the subsequent football loss to Drake on them misplacing the dog. Mex was later found and is now buried under the stadium.

For their mascot, Sooners eventually adopted a “wagon,” a covered one, aka, a “Conestoga” that answers to “Sooner Schooner” and is pulled by a pair of ponies, Boomer and Sooner.

They do a lap or two following Sooner touchdowns. There have been mishaps over the years when the drivers zigged when they should have zagged, sending the wagon flip-flopping on its side and the drivers tumbling head-over-teacup onto the turf.

OU’s old Big 12 rivals still chuckle warmly and often belly-laugh when clips of those misadventures pop up.

The Sooners are SEC newcomers, of course, but had been auditioning for the league ever since the early 1950s when then-school president George Cross, while begging for more funding from the state legislature, uttered the immortal words, “I would like to build a university of which the football team could be proud.”

The Sooners will fit right in their new conference.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com