Perhaps the most impressive performance of a wild week one in college football was the LSU Tigers’ complete demolition of a once-proud Clemson program.
The final score, 51-10, is somehow representative, and yet not sufficient to demonstrate how dominant the Tigers were in Lane Kiffin’s LSU debut. Under new quarterback Sam Leavitt and a revamped, transfer-heavy roster, they racked up a remarkable 644 yards on offense, including 309 rushing yards on 58 attempts.
They were equally stifling on defense, giving up just 40 rushing yards on 26 attempts and an anemic 3.0 yards per play, including yardage allowed in garbage time well after the game was decided. To call their defenders “swarming” would be an understatement. Though Clemson rarely had possession, the LSU defense racked up an astonishing 10 tackles for loss and four sacks.
It was a dismantling. An embarrassment for Clemson. A statement win for LSU that immediately cemented the Tigers as a College Football Playoff contender, even with a tough schedule. And as Kiffin himself joked, they didn’t even need their NFL players on the field to do it.
That commitment to finding every advantage, no matter how small, has become a hallmark of Kiffin’s strategy with roster construction and in-game management. And he admitted he brought that mentality to, of all of things, the weather delay in Baton Rouge ahead of kickoff.
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That weather delay lasted for nearly two hours, with a 90-minute warm up period after lightning was spotted within eight miles of the stadium. Officials on site apparently offered Kiffin the opportunity to shorten that 90 minute delay and get the game started earlier than the eventual 8:40pm local time kickoff. And he told reporters after the win that he declined, purposefully, to make Clemson suffer in the terrible Tiger Stadium visiting locker room.
“That locker room sucks over there,” he said afterwards. “And when you sit in there, the longer you sit in there – No, it’s a real thing.”
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“If you haven’t figured out my competitiveness in order to win, if I’m gonna go through all that other stuff for two players, nationally, I’m certainly gonna,” he added. “If I think 90 minutes is gonna help us win the game, we’re gonna sit in the locker room for 90 minutes.”
Is that the reason LSU won? No, of course not. But it is indicative of the mentality Kiffin has brought to Baton Rouge, for good and in the case of the pro player debacle, bad. Find every advantage, turn over every rock, look for every opportunity to make the Tigers better, and put opponents on the back foot.
Clemson, turns out, was on the back foot before they even got to the stadium. But sitting in a dingy locker room waiting for kickoff couldn’t have helped. And Kiffin’s Tigers took advantage. They won’t “need” that help against Louisiana Tech on Saturday, but that bag of tricks might come in handy for the, uh, emotional return to Oxford on September 19. After all, Pete Golding at Ole Miss learned from Kiffin himself.
