I’ve been hesitating to lay down predictions for LSU’s season because in my mind a lot is riding on the opener here in Atlanta tomorrow night, and until today we didn’t have a clear picture of what kind of North Carolina team the Tigers will be facing.
Turns out, it’s the Tarheels’ Junior Varsity.
I’m not predicting LSU will lose this game, but in the back of my mind I can’t help thinking about what complete chaos the program would spiral into if we did. Anything short of absolutely lighting up what remains of the UNC defense and I’ll be questioning things, but if we lose this one … man.
But I think Les Miles and Gary Crowton are smart enough (no, really) to see the situation here. You’ve promised a high-powered offense after a disastrous 2009 and now you’ve got no excuse not to deliver in the opener. Any temptation to go easy on the ‘Heels has to be put aside in the name of putting up big numbers. And I think that’ll happen.
Big nights by Jefferson, Shepard and Randle. Defensively we’ll shut down a weakened version of a weak UNC offense.
LSU 38 – 20
So on to the season as a whole. Before anybody has played a snap, there are only three games I feel confident calling a victory for – Vandy, McNeese, ULM. I suspect we’ll be a better team than Mississippi State and Tennessee. But we almost lost to MSU last year, so I want to see them against Memphis and Auburn before I make a pick for our game. The Vols have extremely low expectations, so let’s see if that’s validated against Oregon and Florida.
Right now I would lean toward us beating West Virginia and Ole Miss. And I would lean toward us losing to Alabama and Florida. Auburn and Arkansas are wildcards at the moment. Outside of Vandy, there’s nobody on our SEC schedule who I’d feel confident projecting a bad season for. And outside of Bama and Florida, nobody I would project as especially strong.
Arkansas and Auburn have potential to be very good. MSU and UT have low expectations and could be better than projected. And Ole Miss – well who knows? Masoli will play and might not even get arrested again before November. We’ll have clarity in about a month, but right now there’s a lot of haze in the SEC outlook.
For now, then, I’ll say LSU fails to deliver an upside surprise and loses to both Alabama and Florida. And we split Auburn and Arkansas; beating one of those two. The optimistic outlook beyond that is we beat Ole Miss, MSU Tennessee and West Virginia. That is to say – the team we only came close to beating last year because Dexter McCluster dove out of the way of an onside kick; the team it took Chad Jones’ superpowers to beat last year; the team Les Miles blew a 21-point lead to in his very first game in Tiger Stadium and a potentially-explosive team we’re unfamiliar with. Too much bad joo-joo for me to project a sweep of those four.
Hey – I’m projecting 8-4! Awesome. Of course there’s room for an upside swing from that. I wish the UNC game was one I could draw some conclusions out of, but without their starting defense it won’t be. Unless the results are poor (i.e. we lose or barely skate by), this weekend and next weekend against Vandy won’t tell us much. Depending on how they look, MSU could give some clues, but we face the potential to be an untested and over-confident 5-0 team heading in to Florida if MSU, WV and UT aren’t better than projected.
This well could be a season divided; 5-0 to start, 3-4 to finish. We’ll see.
