LSU was the team everyone expected to get pulled into the mess. Instead, it came out looking like a wrecking ball.
The pregame conversation centered on the noise around the program - the SEC fight, the federal court battle, the questions about whether LSU would keep chasing NFL castoffs for its roster. None of it seemed to matter once the ball was kicked off.
No. 13 LSU buried No.
23 Clemson, 51-10, and turned what could have been a distraction into a statement win.
Linebacker Whit Weeks said the outside talk never reached the locker room.
“This team’s not distracted at all,” LSU linebacker Whit Weeks said.
After that kind of result, it’s hard to argue.
Lane Kiffin, who has been at the center of the controversy, wasn’t interested in turning the postgame into another round of debate about whether the issue is settled or merely on hold.
“I’m not getting into it,” LSU’s coach said after the game. “This night was awesome for our fans, and that shouldn’t be the storyline, but I appreciate the question.”
What Kiffin did want to talk about was the way LSU handled Clemson. His proposal to add NFL players through a portal became the subject of a court case, and the SEC responded with a countersuit in federal court. If LSU had stumbled against Clemson, that would have been the easy explanation handed down afterward: too much drama, too much noise, too much of a mess to focus.
Instead, LSU turned the whole night into a blowout.
“I was trying to say it during the week, I don’t think that does anything to” distract the players,” Kiffin said, but “I’m glad we played well, because otherwise it would’ve been the whole story.”
That has become a familiar pattern for Kiffin. He draws attention the way some coaches draw coverage - constantly, and usually for reasons that have little to do with X’s and O’s.
And yet his teams keep stacking wins anyway. LSU’s coach is 12-1 since the start of last season, and the drama around him seems to bounce off his locker rooms rather than settle in.
A year ago, when he was at Mississippi, his Rebels won five straight while Kiffin dealt with the possibility of leaving for another job and a fight with his bosses over whether he could take a new job and still coach the old one in the playoff. That was supposed to be destabilizing.
It wasn’t. Ole Miss got better in the middle of the storm.
The same thing happened here.
“I think it’s overrated,” Kiffin said, of the effects of the theater unfolding outside of a program. “I’m not saying I do a great job of controlling it. I just, I think it’s overrated.”
He wasn’t exactly trying to quiet the noise, either. At halftime, during a televised ABC interview, Kiffin joked, “Imagine if we had pro players."
Then he made sure everyone knew he knew he’d landed another line.
“There you go. You got another line,” Kiffin said.
The game itself never gave Clemson much of a chance to make the off-field talk relevant. LSU turned the ball over on the second play, and Clemson used it for a field goal.
That was about the extent of the opening jolt. From there, LSU took over completely and, as Kiffin put it, delivered a “51-0 run” before the first quarter even ended.
“We really have done an incredible job of blocking it out,” said transfer quarterback Sam Leavitt, who put on a show in his first start with LSU. “It’s really not even been a thought process in the building. … We come to work, we put our heads down, and we grind.”
Weeks said the chatter outside the building didn’t register inside it.
“Nobody talks about the noise going on outside this building,” Weeks said.
That would have sounded ridiculous if LSU had lost. After a 51-10 demolition and nearly 500 yards of offense more than Clemson, it sounded exactly like what the night looked like: a team that heard the uproar, ignored it, and kept right on rolling.
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