Apologies for derailing your thread, but Drew, you hit on something I've long thought you and a lot of our fans missed the boat on when it came to our former coach. He didn't play with fire nearly so much as people wanted to think. He had a plan, and the two major tenets of that plan was 1) don't get blown out, and 2) trust your kids to go make a play. It won a lot of games.
1) Yeah, a lot of the games were uglier than people wanted, and caused all manner of concerns about "squandering talent" or whatever. He wanted to possess the ball and take away the other team's ability to run away with anything, and he really, really, REALLY wanted to avoid turnovers. And it all made a recipe for a lot of contests where games against inferior teams looked the same as against good teams. There were plenty of blowouts--though people conveniently forget them--but it's true there were also a lot of ugly games against lesser teams that made you feel like we should be doing more. I'm convinced it was by design. The main thing is don't give the other team a chance to blow it open. The reason why too many poor teams hung around is the exact reason why lesser LSU teams could still take Alabama to overtime and scare the hell out of them, and have a chance.
2) When he drags every team, great or small, into the mud and forces you to play that game, maybe the little guy has more of a chance than he ought to, but it doesn't matter. Because in crunch time, whether it's a bad team or a national champs, the Hat trusted his guys. He counted on them to get out there and go lay it on the line for him. They knew it and they loved him for it. For as conservative as he was thought to be, he really had a long history of putting all his eggs into the basket of a kid or two and saying hey....go be amazing...give it your best and I believe you're better than the guy across from you....and then the kids believed it because he did. The fake FGs, the late TD against Auburn, going for it on 4th down, all of it....it wasn't recklessness and it wasn't luck. It was his style. His idea was we practice this stuff, why would we NOT go do it in a game when we need it most? He had a plan that was conservative, but a style that was aggressive, if that makes sense.
All that to say, I think you're on to something with Butch. It matters what a guy believes about his players. I watched it for 11 years here full throttle. I'd imagine it can have a negative impact as much as a positive one. UT strikes me as the polar opposite of all this....they'd rather blow the game open, but if they can't, they might very well freeze up. If you don't think Butch trusts the players when the going gets tough, then that's huge. They pick up on all that, and they're going to respond accordingly.