It'd be hard to find many teams in the country with better ooc schedules than LSU the last 20 years and we've done okay, although the marquee games do indeed come near the beginning of the season. The tradeoff to that as a fan, in a sense, is that every 4th year one of the patsies is really bad, as in FCS. I could be wrong, but I believe there's a stipulation in place with someone/something that says LSU can't play an FCS team more often than that. If I'm right about that, I think we're doing it as often as it's allowed.
I wanted to see what our Novembers looked like since the last expansion where we got handed A&M at or near the end of the season. Excluding 2020 which featured only conference games, that's 10 seasons. Body-bag games are so forgettable that I had to check, and we're at .500 for playing non-conference schmucks in November. 5 years we played a string of four SEC opponents. 3 years there was a schmuck scheduled in November. The final two years featured only three games in November, with the now-usual pre-Bama bye week taking up a November spot. Those seasons featured all-SEC Novembers, but with only 3 games played and not 4. It should be noted that there would've been an additional year which would've replaced one of the 4-SEC-team Novembers, which was 2016 where LSU and Florida made up their October date canceled for hurricane reasons. We played 4 SEC teams that November, but the original plan would've been a body-bag that was canceled so the conference game could be made up.
fwiw, 2019 was a 4-SEC team November, which didn't matter at all. And I assume this is the case for all the big boys...they're going to win their games no matter if they play a patsy or another SEC game...the best team almost always wins. I'm skeptical this actually matters because the premise assumes Bama and UGA would be losing more games if they played SEC teams late instead of cream-puffs, and that is entirely unjustified imo.
