It looks bleak for LSU’s football team going into Saturday’s road game at fourth-ranked Alabama, but as someone who tries to see the bright side of things, I can offer a glimmer of hope.
It has nothing to do with logic. LSU, with three straight losses – albeit to nationally-ranked teams – is in disarray with an interim head coach and an interim athletics director. Alabama is ranked No. 4 in the country with a 7-1 record and six straight victories after losing its season opener. The Crimson Tide, playing at its home Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa Saturday evening in a 6:30 p.m. game Saturday, is favored by 10 ½ or 11 points.
Logic says Alabama should win by at least 11 points, maybe a lot more, but you never know. There are precedents of unexpected upsets in the past, and one, especially, comes to mind.
Things looked even bleaker in 1993 before LSU played at Bryant-Denny Stadium. LSU, under coach Curley Hallman, was coming off consecutive losing seasons and was 3-5, and home attendance had dropped to just more than 63,000, the lowest in 23 years. Tiger Stadium, so often known as Death Valley, was more like Debt Valley.
Alabama, under coach Gene Stallings, on the other hand, boasted a 31-game unbeaten streak, the longest in the nation. It was ranked No. 5 in the country, was 7-0-1 and in the hunt for its second straight national championship.
Yet, LSU – normally hapless LSU – somehow won, 17-13. Leesville’s Kevin Mawae, who earned a spot in the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame after a lengthy NFL career, was a senior center on that team. After a walk-through at the stadium on the day before the game, he called a players-only huddle and encouraged his teammates to play the next day’s game as if it were a bowl. He noticed the sky darkened and he told them, “Look, if we win this game, Alabama will have a gray cloud over their heads this season. And we will be the ones who put it there.”
It helped LSU’s cause that Alabama starting quarterback Jay Barker was out with an injured shoulder. It also helped that the Tide’s leading rusher, Sherman Williams, injured his shoulder on Alabama’s first possession and missed the rest of the game. That sidelined the running game, which was ineffective aside from a 43-yard fake punt.
The backup quarterback to Barker couldn’t control the offense, and the third quarterback, versatile David Palmer, rallied the Tide from a 14-0 deficit but it was too little, too late.
LSU picked off four passes — two by Ivory Hilliard that set up short TD drives in the third quarter — and the Tigers added a fourth-quarter field goal. Strangely, that’s all LSU needed offensively to topple the uninspired defending national champions.
So even though LSU has not in any game played up to its lofty preseason billing, it may just be that without any pressure, the Tigers may find their groove – and a valor under adversity. Picture Rooster Cogburn going against Ned Pepper’s gang, shooting two pistols while wearing an eye patch and riding towards the bad guys on horseback.
Will the offensive line suddenly be able to block even a three-man rush? Can the Tigers muster a decent running game?
It could happen. And, yes, pigs can fly, as they did at Bryant-Denny 32 years ago.
Exchange fold
This past summer, the Exchange Club of Central Louisiana, which had been around under one title or another since 1942, folded. Sadly, it may be just the first of other organizations that will have to do the same in coming months or years, for the same reason: a lack of members.
“We reached the point that many of our members were forced out due to age and/or health reasons,” said Exchange Club board member David Michiels, a past president. The club’s by-laws required a minimum 20 members, and Michiels said the club had dwindled to 23 members, and the back-breaker was last spring when the club couldn’t muster enough members to work at the Alexandria River Fete.
The Exchange Club supported many community events and fund-raisers, but Michiels said the best thing the club probably did was award scholarships to college-bound students. “We’d give a scholarship to a different student for eight months of the year, and in the ninth month, we’d look over the eight winners and from that group give another one to the student we felt was the most deserving.”
Michiels said when he first started working at a local bank, it required its employees to be on at least one and preferably two civic clubs, and other businesses had similar requirements. “No more,” he said. “As with any organization, fresh blood was needed to continue growth and prosperity, but little was found.”
Kudos to the club for all the fine work it has done for so many years.
Best five World Series
The recently completed 2025 World Series between the winning Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays is being touted as the best of all time, going a full seven games and loaded with amazing catches, home runs, double plays and records, agonies and ecstasies. The Blue Jays missed by inches winning the Series on a play at home plate in the seventh game.
It’s hard to pick a single Series as the all-time best, but I’d put it in my top five, along with the 1975 Series between the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Red Sox, the 1991 Series between the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves, the 2016 Series between the Chicago Cubs and Cleveland Indians and the 2017 Series between the Houston Astros and the Los Angeles Dodgers.