There’s a lot that’s new here. New pieces can cause excitement, and in this case, many still are. Things needed to change, new players needed to be brought in. That doesn’t mean a transition is going to be easy.
We didn’t expect much, but that’s still a loss that hurts.
Optimism built throughout the summer as LSU gained momentum on the recruiting trail, and we heard good things about how players looked in camp.
After dropping the season opener in 2020 and 2021, this looked like a time when LSU might be able to start the year on the right foot.
With the way that game ended, what’s essential here can become blurry. There’s so much to think about here, and the blame doesn’t belong at the feet of any single entity. This was as much of a team loss as a loss can be.
Every unit had its good moments and their bad and the same can be said for individual players. Jayden Daniels legs kept LSU in the game, creating big first downs when LSU needed it most. He also marched LSU the entire field length to set up that final touchdown.
Daniels struggled in the first half, though. It’s hard to tell how much of his struggles were his own doing, the offensive line, the playcalling or the wide receivers. In the first half, nobody on offense stepped up.
Daniels showed enough to keep the job moving forward. LSU doesn’t need to play musical chairs at quarterback right now. The Tigers need consistency, and it needs to allow someone to get comfortable back there.
It shouldn’t be lost on us that LSU did not quit. This team crawled back into this game and made some big plays in some big moments. The heartbreaking way it ended can make it easy to forget, but this was a one-point loss where a lot of the underlying numbers were solid.
Going forward, my opinion of this team has not changed much. It’s going to take some time to fix some of these issues, it always was, but they showed enough to where I think a fix is possible.
