FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Don’t look now, but the free radicals of college football are on the loose.
What’s a free radical, class? It’s defined as an unstable molecule. That’s as good of a description as I can think of to describe this LSU football team after Saturday’s 34-10 victory here over Arkansas.
Yeah, the Tigers don’t exactly play what you would refer to as the beautiful game. They still give up big plays on defense (though fewer and fewer it seems as each week goes by). Saturday, they traded ineffective run blocking for a slew of offensive line penalties that bogged down their offense, allowing an overmatched Razorbacks team to hang with LSU longer than it probably deserved to.
But LSU has won six in a row now since that loss to USC in Las Vegas to start the season. I’m sure Brian Kelly, an avid golfer, would love to buy a mulligan on that one. We’ll never know, but if those two teams played now, I think the Tigers would torch the Trojans.
USC dropped to 3-4 on Saturday with a loss at Maryland. LSU is trending in the other direction, the gulf between them expanding as quickly as the universe.
You know that popular social media phrase when someone shows you two photos side by side and says, “How it started … how it’s going.” LSU started going nowhere with yet another maddening season-opening defeat. But then the Tigers started winning week after week after week, improving with each mile of the season that clicks on the odometer.
And now? Thanks to Georgia’s 30-15 upset of No. 1 Texas in Austin, Texas, while LSU was tenderizing Arkansas in the second half, the Southeastern Conference has turned into a complete free-for-all. Who would have thought it, but the last two undefeated teams in SEC play will meet on the last Saturday in October in College Station, Texas: LSU (6-1, 3-0) at Texas A&M (6-1, 4-0).
Suddenly for the Tigers, their issues have been drowned out by opportunities. LSU probably will be the underdog in Aggieland, but name a game the Tigers can’t win the rest of the way? There isn’t one.
It was obvious when LSU got ready to play the Rebels last week that the Tigers were entering an arduous four-game stretch that would define their season: Ole Miss, at Arkansas and A&M, home against Alabama. Now it’s the Tigers who are in position to define terms. Putting themselves in contention for one of those two coveted spots in the SEC championship game, then one of those even more coveted spots in the newly expanded 12-team College Football Playoff.
From written off to written about as a national player in less than two months. What a story.
Afterward, someone asked Kelly the question of the moment facing the Tigers: “Why not us?” He didn’t back away.
“I think that’s pretty clear that this group understands that now,” Kelly said. “I think they can sense they have put themselves in a good position. Now they’ve got to go earn it on the road, but there is clearly a different way they perceive themselves over the next six weeks.
"They believe they’re getting better, and I believe they are as well.”
Two huge pass plays defined LSU’s 29-26 overtime victory over Ole Miss last week: Garrett Nussmeier’s 23-yard fourth-down touchdown pass to Aaron Anderson to force overtime, and his 25-yard touchdown pass to Kyren Lacy to win it in overtime.
On this Saturday night, the game was defined by one play. One play that may come to define this season.
With LSU leading 16-10 but momentum peeking over at the Razorbacks’ sideline, linebacker Whit Weeks and Star defensive back Major Burns made Arkansas quarterback Taylen Green the unwilling rally point inside his 10-yard line. Weeks tipped Green’s frantic pass attempt to himself near the 5 and went down in a tangle of bodies at the 2, his interception setting up the second of Caden Durham’s three touchdown runs on the next play.
That sequence gave LSU a 24-10 lead. It wasn’t game, set, match, but momentum suddenly imagined how much fun the Tigers’ charter home was going to be and that the campus bars might still be in celebration mode when they got back.
For the second straight week, the LSU defense didn’t give up a touchdown in the second half. Like knights of old, the defense is making plays to help LSU win games, not being a liability to be overcome. It's the kind of defense the Tigers need to be a national player. The kind of defense Weeks always thought the Tigers had in them.
“We know who we are,” the ever-smiling Weeks said. “At the end of the season, everyone is going to know who we are.”
That sounds like an anthem for a team that might turn out to be quite different from how we perceived it not long ago.
Radical thought.
