“The Bluegrass Miracle” of little more than a week ago turned into something one might call “The Baton Rouge Blunders” Saturday night against Alabama.
The LSU football team committed numerous mistakes which led to its 31-0 blanking by the Crimson Tide.
Penalties continued to plague the Tigers as they were penalized 10 times for 77 yards. Six of the ten penalities were illegal movements along the offensive line.
“I think we had at least six procedure penalties on offense, which were all things that set us back on the down and distance,” said LSU coach Nick Saban. “We had a lot of false starts, and it really, really hurt us.”
LSU left tackle Rodney Reed said the offensive line had trouble hearing quarterback Marcus Randall at the line of scrimmage, which led to the false start penalties.
“Some of the guys were having problems hearing the snap count,” Reed said. “It was an excited crowd out there tonight, and we normally don’t go on silent at home here. The quarterback was going through the cadence and a few of the guys were just having problems hearing the cadence.”
He also said Randall had control of the huddle despite the crowd noise, but things just broke down.
“It’s not just Marcus,” Reed said. “It’s everything around us.”
In LSU’s first drive of the second half, the Tigers appeared to stumble at they lined up to punt on their own 43-yard line. Then, linebacker Bradie James took the snap and ran 29 yards to give LSU a first down on the Alabama 28.
But, as the tables began turning back to LSU’s side, Randall fumbled the ball and Alabama’s Antwan Odom deflated the Tigers’ recovering the ball at the Alabama 20.
“We just couldn’t get anything going,” Randall said. “It was just one of those games.”
The Tigers fumbled the ball two more times with ‘Bama snagging one of the two.
“All in all, there is not one phase of this game that we don’t need to improve on,” Saban said. “There’s not one phase of the game where I can sit here and say I thought we did a good job in. Like always, we’re all responsible for it. We need to have a better plan. We need to have a better plan of things that the players that we have can do.”