After the LSU women’s basketball team completed a 92-19 dismantling of Centenary to open this season, Centenary coach Bojan Jankovic had strong things to say about the Lady Tigers.”I’m sure they can compete for the national championship with what they have this year,” Jankovic said. “You can see the difference from last year. They had a great team last year, but now they are getting better.”That victory feels very far away now, just like the optimism the team probably felt after the game. LSU now sits at 15-7 — 4-6 and ninth in the Southeastern Conference — and unless they can find a way to get back to their winning ways, they may find themselves at home come tournament time.LSU has lost six of its last eight games, but not for lack of trying. It seems like just as one of the Lady Tigers’ issues gets resolved, another pops up.The Lady Tigers are playing with a championship effort, but nothing is going right for them.Last week was a perfect illustration of how this season has gone.LSU lost a tough 49-46 contest to No. 19 Georgia. Heading into the game, the Lady Tigers were struggling on defense and couldn’t seem to find their rhythm against zone defenses. LSU had held the SEC’s last place team, Alabama, to just 41 points and beaten the Tide’s defense to put up 78 points, but the real challenge would appear when the Lady Tigers headed to Athens, Ga. The Lady Tigers played great defense and held Georgia to just 35 percent shooting, but LSU shot just 27 percent in the game.LSU’s shots just didn’t fall. “We played as hard as we could,” LSU coach Van Chancellor said in a news release after the loss. “Our defense was the old LSU defense tonight, but we couldn’t make a shot when we needed to. If you can’t score, it’s hard to win in this league.”The Lady Tigers got back in the gym and focused with hopes of getting their offense together as they readied to play an Ole Miss team that defeated LSU earlier in the season.Only LSU senior guard Allison Hightower reached double figures in the loss to Georgia, but three Lady Tigers scored more than 20 points against Ole Miss.LSU sophomore forward LaSondra Barrett, who had a season low four points in the loss to Georgia, scored 23 points and pulled down 11 rebounds against the Lady Rebels.Hightower scored 31 points in the game, and LSU junior Katherine Graham logged the third triple-double in the history of the program. Graham scored 20 points, grabbed 10 rebounds and dished 10 assists, but even that wasn’t enough as the Lady Tigers came up just one free throw short of sending the game into a fourth overtime.LSU lost, 102-101, after three overtimes. “I thought we played with an incredible effort today,” Chancellor said. “I thought we fought as hard as we could fight. I felt we lost the game early, not late. Late in the game, we did all we could. They made some incredible shots in the end. The difference in the game was we couldn’t rebound the ball over a team that I thought we could really keep off the offensive boards.” This week the Lady Tigers will head to the gym to try and iron out the newest wrinkle on the path to victory.But it feels like each team they play finds LSU’s weak spot.The key to victory for LSU when it played No. 3 Tennessee was to keep the Lady Vols off the offensive boards, which they did. But they were unable to break Tennessee’s zone defense and fell, 55-43.If the Lady Tigers want to look like the team that could compete for a national championship, they will need some momentum, and to do that they will need to play near-perfectly from here on out.Very good just doesn’t seem to be enough this year for LSU.Amos Morale is a 22-year-old history senior from Houston. Follow him on Twitter @_amosmorale3.—-Contact Amos Morale at [email protected]