At least LSU won’t have to worry about the gondola when the Tigers open the season against Brigham Young tonight.

It was a major concern the first time head coach Ed Orgeron saw the Louisiana Superdome, way back in pre-naming-rights days before the iconic venue had “Mercedes-Benz” corporately tacked on its surname.

It was only the second year the big building had been opened in 1976 when Orgeron, then a sophomore at South Lafourche High, played St. Augustine High there in a quarterfinal playoff game.

“They had turf shoes,” Orgeron recalled of the St. Aug players. “We had Converse tennis shoes.”

But head coach Ralph Peré biggest concern was something else — the multi-sided screen that at the time hung from the top of the Superdome roof.

“Coach Peré told us he didn’t want anybody looking up at that gondola,” Orgeron said, “that it would distract us.

“So everybody ran on to the field head down, everybody had their heads down the whole game. Nobody dared look up. I remember that for sure.”

St. Aug won 13-6, although Orgeron’s high school team did win the state title the following year.

The gondola was taken down years ago. The Superdome has been remodeled numerous times.

Orgeron was an assistant coach at Miami when the Hurricanes won the 1989 national championship with a Sugar Bowl victory over Alabama in the Superdome. He was on a Syracuse staff that came down to play Tulane one year and he got familiar with the dome as an assistant with the NFL Saints in 2008.

But tonight will be different.

“As a kid I always dreamed about bringing a team from LSU to the Superdome,” Orgeron said this week. “Now it’s happening my first game.”

That wish wasn’t supposed to come true this quickly, however, as Orgeron begins his first full season in his dream job.

The game, of course, was originally scheduled for NRG Stadium in Houston. Then Hurricane Harvey and historic flooding intervened and put a football game well down list of Houston’s priorities.

Hence the move to New Orleans, although the Superdome will do its best to recreate the signage and field markings of the original Advocare Texas Kickoff Classic.

“It worked out pretty good for us,” Orgeron admitted.

LSU’s players will be in their first game as Tigers in the Superdome, but LSU is 13-5 overall in it, including two national championship games, in 2003 and 2007.

The last time there, however, LSU was soundly beaten following the 2011 season in a 21-0 loss to Alabama in a national championship game in which the Tigers did not cross midfield until late in the fourth quarter.

That shouldn’t be a problem tonight — or, if it is, LSU fans are in for a big disappointment.

The buzz about the game concerns the new offense by coordinator Matt Canada, who has a mandate to upgrade the Tigers’ habitually stale attack.

“He’s ready to go,” Orgeron said of Canada, who built top-flight, dynamic offenses at Pittsburgh and North Carolina State before being lured to LSU. 

“Consistency,” Orgeron said. “Running the ball 50 percent, throwing the ball 50 percent, being unpredictable in formations, running a spread offense. I know all those things are going to be there.”

The Superdome will find out tonight.

Without the gondola.