Distilling the essence of Saturday’s LSU-h Tech game is a fairly simple task.
The defense played a lights-out game.
The offense had a blackout game, with the emotions matching the dark, flat sky that enveloped Tiger Stadium as the game wore on.
A “blackout game” is how Lane Kiffin describes when a team just goes blank and fails to live up to its presumed standard, especially on one side of the ball.
It wasn’t the entire effort, mind you. The LSU offense rolled up a lot of yards between the goal lines throughout and ended up with a respectable scoring total in what turned out to be a 45-14 victory. Most of the college football-adoring nation — which like the Tigers already has turned its collective gaze toward next Saturday’s emotion-packed showdown at Ole Miss — won’t give the final score much more than a cursory glance.
But a deeper look inside the numbers reveals much more of a mixed grill, and clearly deeper concerns going to Oxford where 60,000 berserk, Kiffin-hating Rebels fans will be lurking.
This was a strange one to decipher, starting with how LSU looked much more impressive in carving up Clemson 51-10 than it did subduing the Bulldogs. For much of it, 2026 LSU looked like 2025 LSU, an offensively inept outfit that scratched and clawed for a 23-7 second-week win over h Tech.
After steamrolling for 309 yards rushing against Clemson, LSU struggled to establish the run against a Tech defense that set its deflector shields to stopping the Tigers’ ground game with its rather unorthodox 3-3-5 defense. At halftime, LSU had a mythical-looking 278-0 edge in total offense and a 14-0 edge in first downs, but led only 10-7 on the scoreboard because the Tigers kept setting themselves ablaze in the red zone. The biggest torch, a 100-yard pick-six by Tech’s Jordan McRae off Sam Leavitt, cut LSU’s halftime lead to a squeamish 10-7.
Of the 24 points LSU has allowed through two games, 10 of them were attributable to offensive blunders. Clemson got a field goal to start last week’s game set up by another Leavitt interception on that game’s second play. Then there were two touchdowns allowed by LSU backup defensive players.
Against a Blake Baker-quarterbacked h Tech offense that scored an eye-grabbing 80 points against hapless Northwestern State last week, the Blake Baker-coached LSU defense threw the Bulldogs into a locked storage room under a ramp somewhere deep within Tiger Stadium. The LSU defensive starters swarmed Tech all night, posting seven sacks and forcing three turnovers of their own. In the end, Tech managed just 140 total yards with minus-3 yards rushing, the fewest rushing yards allowed by LSU since minus-5 by BYU in 2017 in the Caesars Superdome.
Combined with the 145 yards LSU allowed to Clemson last week, the 285 yards surrendered by LSU through two games is the fewest by the Tigers going way, way back to 1937. “Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea,” as Walter Winchell used to say back then, that’s allowing offense by the eye dropper.
Kiffin peeled the paint last week with his halftime locker-room speech when LSU was up 31-3 on Clemson. I was expecting a mushroom cloud to emerge from the locker room vomitory leading onto the field (don’t look at me like that, that’s what it’s called) this time. Instead, LSU just calmly went about its business, gradually throttling Tech 35-7 over the final two quarters with the only score by the Bulldogs coming on a 67-yard pass thrown against the LSU backups.
Afterward, Kiffin maintained a fairly even philosophical strain as he reflected on the uneven performance.
“Maybe it was perfect for us,” LSU’s 2-0 coach said. “Maybe we needed something like that. Because if we play good on offense and the game is 70-7 or something, we don’t have (the players’) attention.
“We’re in a good place — winning by 31 points and being really upset, you know, we’ve got a good standard going.”
Getting to 3-0 will be a comparatively Herculean task. Ole Miss will be practically frothing for a chance to exact revenge on its old coach — ol’ win ‘em and leave ‘em Lane — in a top-10 matchup before a prime-time national TV audience. LSU definitely has shown it has the chops to beat Ole Miss, which beat a fairly similar class of opponent Saturday night (Charlotte) by a fairly similar score (41-9). But four turnovers on four consecutive drives like LSU had in the second quarter, two in the red zone, likely would spell disaster against the Rebels.
Getting better starts from Leavitt is essential. He’s led LSU to 1,172 total yards so far, the most combined yardage in the first two games in program history. But he’s also thrown four interceptions (three Saturday) to go with two passing and five rushing touchdowns.
“How do I go get on the guys if I feel like I haven’t done my part well enough?” Leavitt asked. “It’s a difficult area, (though) I thought we did a great job in the second half.”
It’s easy to focus on the negatives, but on balance, LSU survived its blackout. The Tigers now head to the harsh spotlight of the season’s most anticipated game, leaving everyone wondering whether they’re ready for all the attention.