LSU Tigers College Football Preview 2021: What Will Happen, Season Prediction
There are two ways to look at the LSU 2020 season.
On one side, it showed just how hard it is to be Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Oklahoma. Those four lose boatloads of talent all the time, and yet there’s a consistency to their greatness. To dive into the cliché bucket, they reload instead of rebuild every year no matter what. LSU couldn’t do that.
On the other side, there’s a rebuild, and there’s what 2020 LSU had to do.
There was still lots and lots and lots of high-end talent, but it was young, for the most part inexperienced, and it all had to figure it out with new coordinators on both sides of the ball and – oh yeah – in a season with that global pandemic thing screwed up everyone.
Throw in the hangover from the historic 2019 campaign, and there was no way last year’s team could’ve measured up.
There’s a third way to look at 2020 LSU, and it speaks to what should be coming in 2021. The defense was a disaster from the start – LSU was the one team that couldn’t seem to figure out Mississippi State – the offense seemingly started everyone but Tommy Hodson at quarterback, and the defense as a whole took a redshirt year.
And now LSU should be good again.
Set The LSU Tigers Regular Season Win Total At … 9.5
But now it’s back to the same problem LSU had before 2019 – and won’t have an issue with if the College Football Playoff system expands to 12. You can be really, really, really good in the SEC, and it still might not be enough.
2021 LSU has the talent to be really, really, really good, but so does Texas A&M, and Florida, and Alabama, and even Ole Miss and Auburn. On the plus side, most of the tough games are in Baton Rouge. On the negative, the one that isn’t is in Tuscaloosa.
There’s more than enough experience in place to just assume eight wins without breathing hard, but there’s just enough uncertainty – especially dealing with the third set of coordinators in three years – to assume a few misfires.
At Alabama, at UCLA – yeah, at UCLA, really – Auburn, Florida, Texas A&M. Those are just the headliners, and that doesn’t include the potential curveball games against Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Kentucky on the road.
The idea of regression to the mean fits. 2019 was an outlier, and so was 2020.
2021 LSU should be back among the powerhouses.
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– What You Need To Know: Offense | Defense
– Top Players | Keys To The Season
– LSU Football Schedule Analysis