Ole Miss fans explained to me they enjoyed the game, and mostly the tail gate before and after. If they won, great, fine, whatever.
An Alabama fan was there nodding and said "Yeah, at Bama, we criticize the team after a 63-7 blowout and everyone is miserable, and drunk."
I get a sense UGA fans are becoming that way too, if they weren't already.
The tailgating scene at LSU was always a major part of the fandom. I don't think that tradition would/could continue if LSU slips into the tier of people who know they're not competing for NCs. In which case, I'm with Brad and ELA.....screw the what the sport has turned into for that. There's been times LSU was bad. There was always the sense that conditions were favorable to be relevant again....have to find the right coach, have to keep the in-state kids in state, etc. Sometimes they did that, sometimes they didn't. There was always hope.
Now we have NIL and the state's wretched economy finally matters to the football program. The average LSU NIL deal is less than half of the average deals at Texas and Georgia, for example. No signs of that changing. Last recruiting cycle, LSU lost out on all their targets they most coveted from the portal, to Texas and FSU, because they were outbid in NIL $. Defensive recruiting is again going poorly, forcing more portal activity, and it's going to be the same story. Why go to Baton Rouge when you can make a lot more money in Austin playing for a team that actually knows how to coach defense?
Add that in with quite a list of odd, questionable, frustrating coaching decisions, and I've done a 180 on my outlook on where the program is headed. If you'd have asked me last year after the regular season, I would've said I was optimistic. A win over Alabama with what I thought was likely to be Kelly's worst team, and outside of an avalanche in the first few minutes in the SEC CG, they went on to play UGA the rest of the game reasonably well, even without the benefit of constant rotation that UGA was able to do. In hindsight, the Alabama win looks like a fluke, a game we stole from a superior team by pulling off a 2 pt. conversion in OT, this team wouldn't play UGA any better despite UGA not being as good and LSU having more players available, and the signs aren't there anymore that the team is making overall progress. In fact, given that the only successful part of the team this year depended on a generational freak at QB, even that part doesn't look repeatable or sustainable. Everything else regressed, the players, the play on the field, and the coaching.
I'm not complaining about a 9-3 season. Having lived through the 90's, this was a great season. I'm forecasting for the future, though, and I think we're probably entering Brad and ELA's description of the teams that max at 9-3 and the decades-long expectation that LSU can be more may have to be adjusted. Time will tell. Alabama built the Death Star, and now Georgia has followed suit. Outside of the conference, Ohio State, Texas, Michigan (for now at least) has done the same thing. LSU is not on par with any of those schools and I don't currently see signs that the team is headed in that direction, or able to. It's going to prove to be a different world when you can't match NIL $ with the big dogs, even
if the coaching were there.
