Scooter Hobbs

Sitting here trying to put LSU’s monumental 37-34 win over Florida into some kind of serious historical perspective … but dang if I can keep a straight face.

There were other factors, to be sure, but the Tigers won a game because a Florida Gator defensive back picked up an LSU player’s loose shoe and tossed it down field. Can’t get around it.

I want to talk about — forget 15-0 and all that national championship silliness — how Saturday night was Ed Orgeron’s finest coaching moment … but I can’t quit giggling long enough.

Kids, huh? What on earth was Florida’s Marco Wilson thinking after he’d dislodged Kole Taylor’s shoe and saw it on the turf. It was the biggest throw of the night, turning fourth-and-6 for the Tigers to first-and-10 and keeping LSU’s game-winning drive alive.

But the story here ought to be that LSU, after all the opt-outs and other depletions, basically took its Freshman Team — schools used to have those — to The Swamp and beat the No. 6 Gators on Senior Night. But, sorry, I’m still chuckling about …

It got a tad surreal when referee James Carter composed himself and managed to deliver this exact-quote explanation for national TV: “Unsportsmanlike conduct, No. 11 of the defense — throwing the LSU player’s shoe 20 yards down the field. That’s his first unsportsmanlike conduct penalty of the game. First down.” It was actually No. 3 that Wilson wore, but Carter gets extra credit for the detail.

We could talk about how an LSU freshman quarterback threw for three touchdowns in his first start. Or that two were to fellow true freshmen and another to a sophomore. Or that another freshman, Eli Ricks, got the pick-six and yet another, B.J. Ojulari, recovered the fumble that gifted the Tigers a field goal just before the half. It went on and on. But all the guffaws were all about something else.

Unsportsmanlike? Of course. No brainer. But not sure any taunting criteria were met. Wilson just casually picked the thing up and tossed it down there with no more malice than Opie walking down a Mayberry dirt road and suddenly deciding to skip a rock across Myers Lake.

Oh, but LSU’s Most Valuable Freshman was Kole Taylor, who was playing only because another freshman tight end, Arik Gilbert, joined the opt-out crowd years ahead of his time. And Taylor was right there, right place at the right time, to lose his shoe at the game’s critical juncture, after being stopped six yards shy of a first down.

I doubt “Throwing an opponent’s shoe” is specifically addressed in the NCAA rule book. When this is corrected will 20 yards be the standard or will 5 yards be enough?

Even Orgeron played along. Barely smiling, pretty deadpan actually, he credited LSU equipment manager Greg Stringfellow for perhaps loosening the shoe strings just enough for the famous shoe to come off and be there to tempt any in-the-moment Gators. Sometimes, it’s the little things.

It was such a moment that some crack investigative reporting by my friends Ross Dellenger of Sports Illustrated and Brody Miller of The Athletic determined that the famous shoe — now perhaps rebranded as “Air Taylors” — came off the assembly line as a Nike Vapor Edge Pro 360 … size 14, to be exact. It no doubt is headed to the LSU Hall of Fame.

Does anybody care what kind of shoe Cade York was wearing when he broke the school record with a 57-yarder through a fog thicker than a freshman’s head, so thick he couldn’t even see it split the goal posts? Of course not. Anticlimactic. Too busy snickering about a shoe. And I’m one of them, babbling all over myself.

I’m sure after a week’s work, Florida coach Dan Mullen kicked off against a 23.5 underdog confident that he had covered all the do’s and don’t’s of the game plan with his team. Missed one.

Contrary to popular rumor there’s nothing wrong with LSU’s locker room culture, even if it looks more like a pre-school class with all the opt-outs. They’d actually been playing hard the last several weeks, even in last week’s Alabama disaster. Saturday night was far from perfect and LSU needed a few nutty breaks — looking at you, doink-doink interception. That one looked like something cooked up for You Tube. But give Orgeron some credit. He kept this team focused and fired up during a firestorm of distractions last week. You don’t win a game like that without a lot of persistence. Still, it’s hard be serious when …

I bet if you asked him, the Gator shoe bandit has no idea what he was thinking when he picked those cleats up.

Meanwhile LSU won, so defensive coordinator Bo Pelini gets a week of relative peace after holding the Gators to a mere 609 yards, only 474 of it through the air against a secondary that was drawing straws to find spare parts. Bottom line, good things happen when next man up just keeps playing 100 percent.

So now the Tigers finish the season with Ole Miss, welcoming Rebels’ receiver Elijah Moore, who’s most famous for imitating a dog relieving itself in the end zone last year that cost them the Mississippi State game. The Tigers can tell him, “We met a guy last week that said to tell you to, ‘Hold my beer.’ “

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.comScooter Hobbs

Admin