HOUSTON — Maybe LSU should have gotten the bulk of its offense to opt-out before the season began.

Or perhaps the Tigers should just go join the Big 12, where Baylor resides.

Or … wait. Just stop it.

The better suggestion here might be to not overanalyze these bowl games.

So let’s everybody just take a deep breath now that it’s finally over and LSU beat Baylor 44-31 in the Kinder’s Texas Bowl.

It’s easy to get caught up in the bowl foolishness. Just don’t try to figure it out.

The prudent move here is to just thank LSU (and give Baylor much credit too) for a highly entertaining, odd-ball sort of game, a contest that occasionally drifted into pie-in-the-face comedy but was non-stop full of typical holiday mischief and unexpected good cheer.

Normally you need joy-buzzers to go with these kinds of hijinks. And, good grief, you never knew what was behind Door No. 3.

Don’t spend a lot of time trying to project it into next season.

Just enjoy it for it was — two tons of fun to end an up and down LSU season.

“You’re talking about a bowl game where a lot of different things can happen,” head coach Brian Kelly said afterwards.

But c’mon, coach. All of them — all of those shenanigans in one game?

Take special teams … please.

If the Tigers weren’t botching an extra point snap or getting a field goal blocked, they shanked a punt. Yet Zavion Thomas returned a kick off 95 yards, his second touchdown return in as many games. Baylor also had kick return, of course but the Bears had two penalties on that one punt to negate it.

“Special teams gaffes, and then you had some spectacular plays,” Kelly said, shaking his head in wonderment.

But let’s start at the beginning.

LSU scraped up enough big bodies to patch together an offensive line missing three starters. Only one of the top four receivers played. Yet that rag-tag bunch didn’t give up a single sack, allowing quarterback Garrett Nussmeier, the bowl MVP, to find enough in the who-dat? array of new faces at receiver to throw for 304 yards and three touchdowns.

In all LSU was missing six offensive starters and rolled up 418 yards while looking like it could score whenever it wanted — even on a direct snap to running back Josh Williams — and might have if not for two turnovers.

On the other hand the LSU defense was fairly intact except for the safeties — and it showed as Baylor actually torched the Tigers for 507 yards, 445 in the air.

Fun fact: With 11:17 to play, total offense was tied, 382-382.

The scoreboard said the Bears were never really in the game after the Tigers got their first defensive touchdown of the year on freshman Davhon Keys’ 41-yard pick six for a quick 14-0 lead.

But LSU didn’t really have the kind of control over the game that leads of 14-0, 28-7, 34-14, etc. would suggest.

How the Bears, who seemed to spend the entire game in the red zone, managed “only” 31 points is for deeper minds to decipher.

Rod Serling, perhaps, should have been the sideline reporter to — cue up the Twilight Zone music — offer an explanation of “in a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.”

Or maybe the Bears just kept screwing up their chances to get back in the game as relentlessly as the Tigers resisted the urge to put it away once and for all.

Did I mention this game had a weird feel?

Every time Baylor looked to be on to something, especially while going 1-for-6 on never-ending fourth down gambles, there was Serling, the mysterious Twilight Zone host, lurking near the pylons.

The game ended, fittingly, on an incomplete fourth-down pass from point-blank range.

But the creepy music reached its crescendo on consecutive third-quarter trips inside the LSU 10-yard line that ended on fourth-down gambles.

The first was an apparent touchdown pass until video review detected the receiver’s foot maybe an eighth-of-an-inch out of the end zone.

The next ended with a snap all of eight feet over quarterback Sawyer Robertson’s head, which might have been milking the gag too far.

But it wasn’t all grins and giggles.

Your tear-jerker moment came when star linebacker Whit Weeks went down with a dislocated ankle late in the first half. His brother, West Weeks, threw down his helmet and was pounding the turf in anguished frustration as the entire team crossed the field and gathered around the wounded Tiger on the opposite sideline. When a golf cart toted him, it was through a sea of fist-bumps and pats on the shoulder.

“Our team responded appropriately,” Kelly said, “because he’s such an important part of what we are.”

Yes, this game truly had something for everyone.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. You can email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com