Craig James mentioned last night that he was a pop warner football coach. He was my coach when I was in 5th grade in Richardson, TX when he played for SMU. If I'd have known what kind of cash he was pulling down at SMU I would have hit him up for a loan. :lol:
i understood his point. hester left hester right hester up the middle is not exactly like watching USC. that first half offense left too much to be desired. certainly shows it wasnt jimbo calling most of the plays the last couple years. look for les to give up more control as the season wears on and let crowton open up. first game, no biggie. things will look much better on offense sooner than later.
Even an unbiased non-LSU, non-MSU, non-USC fan that watched the game realizes that the ESPN crew really sucked. The coverage wasn't the greatest either. *LSU was penalized for P.I. and ESPN didn't even bother to show the replay. Of course one announcer mentioned the replay was shown in the stadium and that the LSU fans were screaming, yet ESPN still didn't show the play. *Nothing against Jackie Sherril but I would prefer to see the plays than have his face take up most of the screen. *When they mentioned USC...they said they would be going for their third BCS title. (Don't you have to win a second one first?) When they mentioned LSU, they made sure to emphasize that we shared a title. (Try selling that line to a casino when trying to cash your USC-2003 bet.) I agree with the post yesterday describing how ESPN used to be good. They've now decided that they don't want to report on sports...they want to BE the show. They've (in their minds) elevated themselves to being the game instead of just reporting it. I'm tired of their terms like "booyah", "he could go all the way", "drains the trey" and just about everything Stephen A. Smith says. It's also funny how most of these geeks refer to the athletes by nicknames like they're best buds from the "hood" or "back in the day". If that's what we call today's entertainiment, then we might as well hand over the keys to the country to the liberals now.
most have come to expect nothing from the espn game crews. outside of ron franklin, err since he left and stroke victim gottfried got fried, theres not a whole lot of expectations left. if you can watch it without turning off the sound, you're probably ahead of the espn curve at this point. they werent the best but not completely terrible. you have to listen like its comedy then its not as bad.
Hold on, folks, this is the same network that just finished a series where they hypothetically played the whole season, and picked us to go 13-0 and play for the BCS title. This with a rookie QB (one start, even in a bowl game, and a season of mop-ups does not make a veteran), one experienced WR, and a patchwork o-line. James came away unimpressed? So did I. And don't give me "vanilla gameplan." Execution transcends the playbook. If Doucet dropped 3 balls that hit him between the numbers, would we excuse it because we kept the gameplan simple? Blockers block, no matter how many pages of the playbook you're using, and last night, our line got beat by one of the lower tier teams of the conference. 45 points was great, but look at the performance as a whole and ask yourself, did that look like the offense of the number 2 team in the country?
Watch some college football this weekend and you'll see lots of unimpressive football. It's the 1st game and, unlike the NFL, there are no preseason games to prepare these guys for the real thing. This is not unique to LSU. If you see the same problems in weeks 2 and 3, then you have some problems.
ESPN never gives the Tigers props....We could beat every team by a landslide and they would still rag LSU and say that we are going to lose the next game blah blah blah ............ If only one of those cowbells would have been shoved up their...well y'all know what i mean :yelwink2:
I didn't say that ESPN sucks 100% of the time, although they seem to get worse every year. The quality of their product has dropped considerably for many reasons because they've become more commentators and entertainers than reporting things as they are. ala ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN.... I wasn't impressed by the offense either...especially in the first half. I'm not going to say it was totally vanilla or all due to a new O.C., QB, receivers, O-lineman, etc. but at the same time to completely disregard those changes would be ignorant. They have a lot of issues to address but the only one that may take more than a week is the breakdown along the offensive line. Stewart didn't look like he knew his position very well. I'm sure VA Tech was watching and will attempt to attack early and often. As far as ESPNs "hypothetical" show, I didn't bother watching. When I tuned in a month ago and saw a few minutes of their "Who's Now?" segments, I realized how bad they've become. Of course they had to throw in Matt Lienart as one of the top players in sports. whatever?
Re: Is Doug Flutie, Well...Retarded? Why are they idiots? For being critical of the offense? They were right. The offensive line did not do a very good job of protecting Flynn. Flynn, despite passing for 12 of 19 attempts, only chalked up 128 yards. When you consider we had 7 turnovers, LSU's net total of 347 yards is not that impressive. MSU held the ball 27 minutes to LSU's 32 minutes. Those figures do not suggest an offensive dominance that the score suggests. Finally, six of the eight penalties were in the first half and all six were on the offense.
It was MSU's first game too, so that's no excuse. I saw Will Arnold in there during the second half, and hopefully he'll be able to step up soon, and we can move Johnson over to the right side. That doesn't help us with Stewart though, and I do believe its going to take him longer than 2 or 3 weeks to improve. That won't help us much against VaTech. As for seeing a whole lot of unimpressive football this weekend, you're right about that, but a whole lot of teams don't see themselves as contenders for the national championship.
