The Tigers will have a golden opportunity to showcase their abilities when they take on No. 8 Miami in AdvoCare Classic on Sunday. The game figures to be one of the best games of the week, giving LSU a great chance to prove their preseason doubters wrong.
“That’s a pivotal game for us,” senior tight end Foster Moreau said during LSU’s appearance at SEC media day in July. “That could steamroll our season one way or another. It’s a rock sitting at the top of the hill. It could roll down the right side of the hill or it could roll down the wrong side.”
Preseason outlets such as CBSsports and bleacherreport have predicted LSU will have one of the hardest schedules in all of college football with five games scheduled against opponents in the AP National Top 25.
The key for the Tigers will be to take the games week-by-week and continue to improve as the season progresses. With new faces at quarterback and running back, the Tigers will have a challenging task to start a season that will only get more difficult as it progresses.
For Moreau, the week one matchup against Miami is like first learning how to swim: “You have to fight for yourself, fend for yourself, and learn from the challenges and make the most of it. You have to survive and conquer, like swimming in the deep end for the first time.”
The Southeastern Conference Media Day voting in July tabbed LSU to finish fifth in the league’s Western Division in 2018 making many people wonder if this season will be a bridge year for the Tigers. Since 2000, LSU was picked to finish lower than third in the West just twice, and in both cases the Tigers exceeded those predictions.
Many people throughout the country believe that LSU’s streak of 18 consecutive seasons of eight wins or more is in jeopardy this season, but junior defensive linemen Breiden Fehoko knows the season is more than just one game.
“Every week we try to approach it one game at a time,” Fehoko said. “We’re definitely not peaked to the top of where we need to be at, and that’s good you don’t want to peak early in the season. I want our best football to be at the time we need it the most, and I think when you take gradual steps as a team, like how we did in fall camp, the season is as high as we wanna make it. We have the talent we have the coaching now we just gotta go out and do it.”
This LSU football team is trying to bring back the past glory that surrounds LSU when the football team is winning. The Tigers will need to push through adversity and possibly some devastating losses during the season if they hope to find the prestige that past LSU teams found.
Former LSU basketball coach Dale Brown once said, “One will not find the true fiber of a man in times of prosperity or success, but only in his resiliency and attitude through times of failure.”
If LSU can push through the success and failures of the season the campus will once again buzz with excitement as the Tigers prove their doubters wrong, claiming their rightful crown atop the SEC.
