Real or not, at least it’s football

Scooter Hobbs

Another Saturday night when football was promised for LSU has come and gone, again with nothing much of anything happening.

Yeah, let’s say your niece had postponed her wedding, just for your benefit, because everybody assured her you’d be nowhere in the vicinity with LSU and Alabama playing that night she’d planned.

But now, it’s no Tigers, no Tide, and you have some explaining to do as to why her socially distanced nuptials had to be put off to February or some such.

A brief detour here, but one of my favorite Alabama-LSU tales was five or six years ago. It was the Monday before that year’s big game and a young lass, quite distraught, took to social media to complain that she was getting nothing but “regrets” for her wedding that Saturday, one that had been meticulously planned for some time.

Her point, as I recall, was that LSU and Alabama, after all, play every dadburn year and she was only getting married this one day, so what’s the big deal and couldn’t everybody just skip the game or leave the TV just this once and just for her.

Who knows? She may have been a sympathy junkie. Maybe dad had already paid the caterer.

But the poor girl got absolutely torched in the comments section, not only by the guys but by just about every female who read her complaint, including several of the bridesmaids.

But we digress.

Hey. It’s 2020, closing in on Thanksgiving. It could be worse. At least it wasn’t another hurricane that got in the way of another Nick Saban return to Baton Rouge.

Oh, well. My guess is that, masked-up and all, he’ll get there eventually, which probably isn’t a good thing for LSU’s psyche this season.

The speculation is that they’ll get the presidential votes counted in Nevada before Bama’s football points are all accounted for when it finally gets its turn against this LSU defense.

There was glimmer of hope this weekend.

If you happened to be up at 1 a.m. Saturday — face it, nobody really knows what time it is any more — then you’d have gotten a false sense that the world was back in some sort of proper orbit, possibly tinged in purple and gold.

But there it was, on ESPNU, out of the nowhere … LSU and Alabama playing football.

LSU apparently agreed to play the game in Tuscaloosa.

It turned out to be a false alarm.

It was merely the 425th replay airing of last year’s thriller, maybe as another caveat for a hurricane-ravaged state.

Maybe it was an LSU ploy to use all available technology to fake this year’s game, sneak one by the NCAA the way we duped the world into thinking we landed on the moon.

But the first tip off was that President Trump, in attendance, was smiling.

Sadly, by dawn’s early light, it was back to reality.

So …

You might want to check my math here, but my best guesstimate is that LSU has had more idle weekends ­— three (3) — than victories — two, although frankly I can’t remember the details of them. Maybe it was Vanderbilt and probably South Carolina.

Something like that.

That wouldn’t be so bad except that, even with an SEC-only schedule, the Tigers have had more of their games against top 25 teams postponed — two; Florida and Alabama — than they’ve managed to play — which is one, although Auburn wasn’t technically ranked until after LSU was kind enough to drop by the War Eagles’ stadium and do a quick belly flop before scurrying off to catch the big Halloween party back in Baton Rouge that night.

It does look rather suspicious, especially in Alabama, that LSU’s two postponed games have come against a pair of top-10 teams, the Tide and Florida, that appear to be on a collision course to meet in the SEC championship game.

But if you’re thinking that LSU is experimenting with herd immunity to dodge the big boys on the schedule, it was Florida that had the coronavirus outbreak that got that game shoved to a later date.

If it seems like that would be odd behavior for defending national champions, not to worry.

There’s lots of nutty stuff going on with college football these days, some of it well outside the SEC.

Penn State is 0-4. Indiana is 4-0. Purdue and Northwestern played as unbeatens Saturday night before a stoic crowd of cardboard cutouts.

Liberty, Cincinnati, BYU and Coastal Carolina are all unbeaten.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s still hard to figure out if this is a real season or not.

But, yes, it still beats no college football at all.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at shobbs@americanpress.comAlabama head coach Nick Saban, left, shakes hands with LSU head coach Ed Orgeron after their NCAA college football game in Baton Rouge on Nov. 3, 2018. Alabama won 29-0.

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