“We just got punched in the face,” Liam Shanahan said bluntly. “We got absolutely killed.”
LSU stumbled out of Jordan-Hare Stadium with more than just bloody noses and black eyes. In their 48-11 defeat to Auburn, the Tigers were punched in their spirit, and it broke.
Tiger fans are entitled to ask many questions about the LSU team they saw Saturday. Let’s break down exactly what went wrong for LSU and what Tiger fans can expect to happen for the rest of the year.
To start, LSU lost the game at the line of scrimmage. Auburn’s defensive line could do no wrong in penetrating the offensive line’s first assignments. LSU running backs averaged a measly 1.2 yards per carry on 27 attempts. The line that helped control the momentum of the game, gave the defense easier opportunities to succeed and prevented T.J. Finley from making too many mistakes by giving him a run game and pass protection against South Carolina was nonexistent. In comparison, Auburn averaged 4.7 yards per rush to total 206 rushing yards. Freshman running back Tank Bigsby scored two touchdowns on the ground and quarterback Bo Nix rushed for one.
“We couldn’t block those guys,” Ed Orgeron said. “I saw other people block their fronts. I really was surprised we couldn’t run the football.”
“We just never really got anything going,” Shanahan stated. “Really throughout the entire game. We weren’t really able to establish the run game early.”
No run game also gave LSU a lot of difficult third downs to convert. An average down to distance of 6.5 yards per third down, compared to last week’s 3.2 yards, doomed the Tigers’ third down efficiency to 5-of-17 for the day. This made many drives sputter and fail.
Because of this lack of a run game and constant pressure from the Auburn defensive line, Finley’s comfortability in the pocket was disturbed often, and it caused him to make two crucial mistakes. The first was an overthrown ball to the sideline intended for Terrace Marshall Jr. that ended up right to Nehemiah Pritchett, who returned the ball to the LSU four-yard line and set up a Bo Nix to Eli Stove touchdown to put Auburn ahead 7-0. Finley was not pressured much on this play; it seems like he just made a lackadaisical throw.
The second was another freshman mistake by Finley, but this time the pocket collapsed on him. In a haste to dump the ball off to a free receiver, Finley failed to protect the ball and Derick Hall forced a fumble, which Christian Tutt quickly recovered and ran into the endzone to score another touchdown.
These two plays gave Auburn 14 points and the overwhelming momentum to run away with the game. When a team is struggling to play defense as much as LSU has this year, these mistakes on offense cannot happen.
But soon after the turnovers, the defense, who played well in the first quarter, limiting Auburn to just 64 yards, got its back snapped in half. A 99-yard touchdown drive before the half blew the game open. The defense seemed to lose its focus and communication skills when Chad Morris called plays that utilized receivers coming into the flat, running wide for screens and executing out routes to perfection. The Auburn offense utilized the LSU defense’s inability to diagnose and tackle players in space. By the end, it seemed players were running free wherever they pleased, in part because Auburn did a great job of keeping the defenders from cheating on routes by running the ball successfully.
“That can just be a lack of communication on the defensive end, but as a whole, our communication was there,” Jabril Cox said. “Certain people just had bad eyes, or just let the man go free. At the end of the day, it was just miscommunication at our end.”
So where can LSU go from here? The bye week seems like a good place to start. This LSU team needs to do a lot of soul searching and decide what it wants to be remembered for. Right now, it is remembered as the LSU team that gave up 500 yards in three of its first five games, could not muster any resemblance of a run game in those three showings and badly misunderstood the importance of communication and understanding of players’ abilities.
The Tigers will face the Alabama Crimson Tide next week. Odds are that Alabama will win that game, but how will the Tigers play, and how will they continue from there? Big games against Arkansas, Texas A&M, Ole Miss and Florida still remain. Those are all matchups this team is certainly talented enough to win.
An understanding of what it takes to succeed is clear now after the same refrain has been sung in all three of the Tigers’ losses: it starts with the rushing attack. Run the ball well, and it benefits nearly every other position group on the team. This has to be the emphasis this bye week.
“We’ve got to look at the tape,” Orgeron said. “See where we went wrong. We’ve got to continue to fix the things we can. We’ve got to be constructive. We’ve got to be positive, and just identify what the problem is and come up with a solution.”
But an understanding much deeper than that is required. Fans are left to themselves to wonder why this team cannot correct the mistakes it continues to make. It is a frustrating and anxious feeling, and it should be amplified for this coaching staff and these players. If they cannot answer these ponderings, it may be the boosters who decide to answer it for themselves, with money instead of cliché phrases.