The BCS Championship game was about as anticlimactic as you can get. I expected Alabama to win this SEC West rematch, but what I didn’t expect was for LSU to go belly up from the time of the team introductions.
The crown jewel of the warped BCS system was awful. Utterly awful.
The Tigers could not have looked any more flat and clueless than they did all night long. Give credit to Alabama–its defense is suffocating–but the LSU players looked like they were sleepwalking through this game, and it’s hard to imagine any less creative play-calling than head coach Les Miles and staff conjured up for this snooze-fest.
The Crimson Tide were clearly fired up for this one. Maybe they read all of the media coverage and fan opinions and blog posts and Twitter feeds and Facebook pages of the vast majority of the American population outside of the State of Alabama who felt that Oklahoma State should be in this game, instead. Maybe head coach Nick Saban used all of that to ignite a flame in his guys. I can imagine him saying something to the effect of, “Go out there and demolish LSU, boys, and then there will be no doubt who the champion is.”
Demolish LSU, they did. The 21-0 final score doesn’t even do it justice. The Tigers defense stiffened up when they had to, forcing Alabama to attempt field goals on seven occasions, but this one could easily have been 56-0. The Tide had 384 yards of offense. The Tigers? 92 yards. Total. For the whole game. LSU didn’t even cross midfield until the middle of the fourth quarter. The one guy in the yellow helmet who did his job was LSU’s punter, Brad Wing, and he did his job quite often, punting nine times in the game–nearly twice as often as the team earned a first down (5).
Tigers quarterback Jordan Jefferson looked like a deer in headlights. On virtually every option play run by LSU, Jefferson looked like he couldn’t get rid of the ball fast enough. It wasn’t a difficult play for Alabama to defend because they all knew that as soon as they got a defender within 10 yards of Jefferson, he was chucking the hot potato to the running back trailing five yards behind him.
Jefferson’s gawd-awful underhanded flip in the general direction of a teammate who had his back to him was … I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen such a mind-bogglingly knot-headed play. Even the Tide defender who intercepted it looked stunned that a back-breaking turnover had just dropped into his lap like that.
Somewhere in the second half, LSU fans started booing Jefferson every time he took the field. I’m sure that was helpful. Apparently they wanted the backup, Jarrett Lee, to play in his stead.
It wouldn’t have mattered.
The play-calling was so unimaginative that nothing LSU tried was going to work. The Tigers kept trying to run wide, and Alabama kept showing its quickness, stuffing plays for losses. So the Tigers tried running wide some more. And some more. And some more. “Maybe it’ll work this time, guys!”
Any attempts to run up the middle were a lost cause, too, as the Tide owned LSU’s offensive line all night long. Pass plays didn’t work because in the off-chance that Jefferson hit the broad side of the barn with one of his passes, LSU receivers dropped it.
The whole thing was just terrible. The BCS had to be feeling pretty smug after the Rose Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, and the Sugar Bowl were all closely-contested, nail-biting games. But then the Orange Bowl happened. And now this train wreck.
Ugh. The fans were right on this one: Oklahoma State deserved a chance to play for the BCS championship. I’m guessing that they would have put up a much better fight against Alabama.
At least they would have acted like they wanted to be there.
The author is a Featured Contributor in Sports for the Yahoo! Contributor Network. You can follow him on Twitter at @RedZoneWriting and on Facebook.
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