Although I haven’t written since the night of the championship, I have been reading, listening, and thinking about the season that has just ended.
I wanted to start with some stats I found interesting and didn’t know until after that night.
Clemson had won 50 games in a row when scoring first and 89 in a row after leading by at least 10 points.
Of course they had also won 29 games in a row overall, meaning that for the second season in a row LSU ended a winning streak of 25 or more (Central Florida had won exactly 25). This was the first time a program ended such streaks two years in a row. Only one program has ended such streaks more than twice in its history. That was Notre Dame in 1946 (Army, which was a winning streak ended by a tie), 1957 (Oklahoma), and 1970 (Texas), so none were even within a decade of the other. Princeton is the only other program to end such a streak twice, in 1889 and 1893 (both over Yale). (The Ivy League was considered top-division college football at the time.)
Something else I noticed when re-watching the game was that on average this season Clemson had given up 264 yards per game. LSU eclipsed 500 yards in the first minute of the fourth quarter.
It was not surprising that Joe Brady was hired away. What was slightly surprising was that after the LSU defense was underestimated through most of the year, the defensive coordinator (DC) Dave Aranda got one of the best available coaching vacancies, at least in terms of how good the team was last season. Baylor was a close second to Oklahoma twice and lost no other games until the Sugar Bowl. Like Oklahoma, the Bears also ran into an SEC team who finished in the same place in the Big XII (LSU and Oklahoma were both champions; Baylor and Georgia were both runners-up). It was also an odd coincidence that the person who hired Brady for the Carolina Panthers is the one who left the vacancy in Waco.
It’s also interesting that after the DC for this year’s championship team was hired away, we decided to bring back Bo Pelini, the DC who was hired away directly after our last championship in 2007. Pelini had also left to coach a Big XII team, although Nebraska is now in the Big Ten. Also worth noting that LSU had top-three overall defenses all three years under Pelini, which corresponded with Les Miles first three years, during which the Tigers had an overall record of 34-6. Pelini was the first DC hired by Miles, and Aranda was the last. Pelini will make over 10 times more per year as the LSU DC than he had been making as the Youngstown St. head coach; but he did coach there while still being paid by Nebraska.
I’ll be interested to see if there is any trouble readjusting to major college football for Pelini, but Coach Orgeron has had a good record in hiring assistants so far. So I’m not overly worried.
I don’t think LSU has a tremendously good chance to repeat as champions even if all the coaches had stayed, but I’m not greedy. I’m OK with someone else winning next year. I just hope it’s not Alabama and preferably not Clemson or Ohio St. either. By the way, I enjoyed a segment with former LSU coach/current Alabama coach Nick Saban and his former offensive coordinator Jimbo Fisher (Fisher and Pelini overlapped as coordinators at LSU in 2005 and 2006, by the way). That segment has been taken down from YouTube, but you can find Fisher (who was the only head coach to go against both LSU and Clemson this season) and Saban (who coached against Clemson a few months before Fisher did) comment separately.
Saban and Fisher are two of only six active head coaches who have won national championships. Orgeron and Miles are two others, so it’s interesting that four of the six have worked at LSU during one of our national championships. The other two are Dabo Swinney and Mack Brown. Mack Brown does have Louisiana ties though. He was LSU’s QB coach in 1982 (shortly after Steve Ensminger graduated) and was the head coach (and athletic director) at Tulane from 1985 to 1987.
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