Column: LSU & Florida in the new 'Trading Places'| by Carl Dubois on Oct 8, 2009 at 10:14 am |  | |
Things aren't always what they seem to be at first glance. The Perkins Road business called Overpass Cleaners does not, research reveals, clean the adjacent overpass.
LSU fans in New Orleans -- and anywhere they could hear radio station WWL -- could listen one recent weekend to something called "Sunday Night Live." Long after the Saints were done with a late-afternoon victory, and after that team's postgame show, listeners heard Jordy Hultberg open his radio show from inside a Baton Rouge restaurant.
Hultberg was watching the final minutes of the Saints game on one of many TVs and mentioned how it looked as if the New Orleans team would come away a winner. So, this was "Sunday Night Live" -- via tape delay.
On the same weekend, you could hear the voice of the Tigers, Jim Hawthorne, having a game-day chat with Mississippi State coach Dan Mullen. I'm pretty sure I remember Hawthorne ending the conversation by thanking Mullen for the visit.
I'm also pretty sure Mullen's answers were, word for word, the same he'd given to reporters three days earlier on the weekly SEC football coaches teleconference. I'm also pretty sure Hawthorne's questions were rewrites of the questions SEC reporters had asked Mullen on that Wednesday morning.
Through the magic of editing, it sounded like a Saturday morning question-and-answer session between Hawthorne and Mullen.
My, oh my.
To say perception is reality in most cases would be like a visit to the Department of Redundancy Department, but it's true our perception of reality forms our reality. Sometimes, our delusions are all we have to cling to, our only comfort, even if they reinforce a perceived negative reality.
If you don't believe me, try to take away someone's grief or misery or vicious cycle when it's the only thing they know.
Then there are the times when the onset of a new reality has a positive transforming energy for which there is no substitute. I'm reminded of my first few LSU seasons in Baton Rouge.
The first was a mere two years removed from the night the Tigers stunned No. 1-ranked Florida, when Gerry DiNardo brought back the magic to Tiger Stadium with an exclamation mark. Like most magic tricks, it was a transient illusion. In its next game, LSU lost to Ole Miss, and in its next season, LSU failed to live up to a top-10 preseason ranking.
The next year was 1999, when DiNardo was coaching what would prove to be his last season with the Tigers. LSU tried to "white out" the Florida Gators, and on a rainy, sour afternoon, Steve Spurrier and Florida won 31-10.
A year later LSU went to Gainesville for a 41-9 loss that became a talking point. We learned about the brook trout look, that vacant stare of a fish with a hook in its mouth, the look of having given up the fight because, well, it's over.
We heard and recognized how some teams and players know it's over before it's over, because they're stuck in a culture of losing and fighting against a culture of winning. An outsider -- the nerve! -- spoke the harsh truth about breaking free from the vicious cycles of the former and learning to cultivate the virtuous cycles of the latter.
If the extent of your ambition, he said, is to pay the light bill and have a few dollars left for sitting on the couch and drinking a cold one, you're probably not on the path to becoming chief executive officer at IBM.
Thus began another phase in LSU's quest to become the type of football program that gives others the brook trout look, the kind of program that prompts the opponent to know it's over before the game even starts.
You don't change a culture overnight. Florida returned to Tiger Stadium in 2001 and owned LSU in a 44-15 victory marked by precision passing, selective and effective running and fast, fly-to-the-football defense. One of the subtexts of the afternoon was how two programs were on two ends of the culture-of-winning spectrum.
LSU went on to win the SEC that year. Spurrier left Florida, where a 10-2 season was no longer as exciting or satisfying anymore, and he and the Gators parted ways and began redefining themselves.
Since then, LSU and Florida have been trading punches, jockeying to become the team of the decade. Since that 2001 afternoon in Tiger Stadium, each has won two national championships.
The Gators won in 2006 and 2008 after convincing victories against LSU in the regular season. LSU lost to Florida but still won the 2003 BCS national championship, and in 2007 the teams gave Tiger Stadium one of its most remarkable Saturdays in a storied history.
The past eight seasons reveal a 4-4 split in the series. There are spirited debates about the relationship of one team to the other, and about each team's place in history, both recent and long term.
Spurrier went to the NFL and came back to the SEC and a new reality. So did the outsider who told the fish story. He's making CEO money, just not at IBM.
LSU and Florida turned to new outsiders, coaches that few who were in Tiger Stadium a decade ago could have readily identified. The names have changed, and so has the nature of this SEC East vs. West rivalry. Both teams walk into the other guy's place looking for victory, not just survival, and yet that hasn't happened since LSU won in Gainesville in 2004.
These programs reshape our perceptions of them in less dramatic swings these days, not like going from the fish-hook look one year to winning an SEC championship and a Sugar Bowl the next. Yes, there is drama -- who can forget 5-for-5 on fourth down in 2007? -- but it comes inside the details, not so much in the long shot of a wide, big-picture lens.
Will Tim Tebow play? If so, how much? And on what types of plays? Can Florida win without him? Can LSU put a complete game together and thrust itself firmly in the championship conversation on the heels of a disappointing 8-5 season? Are these programs about to trade places again?
Four of the past six BCS national championships -- including the last three -- will be represented Saturday night in Tiger Stadium. LSU and Florida have a much different relationship than a decade ago, and it's fun to watch them wrestle for supremacy, and by extension, the way they are perceived on the national college landscape.
They've been trading places lately, and the dynamic is something that couldn't have been anticipated not long ago.
It's more fun if you perceive them as needing each other in some ways, as measuring sticks. And yet, you can find plenty who'll say LSU is still chasing Florida, that the perception is the Tigers have more to prove than the Gators. In the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately department, that's true.
College football, with its BCS formula of polls and computers, sells us on discussion, opinion, argument.
Perception.
Sometimes it seems like the only place reality prevails is the scoreboard, but that can be an illusion too.
There is plenty about Saturday's matchup to get the juices flowing without going too far back in time, but I dare say it's more enjoyable as another snapshot in a series of ongoing tug-of-war matches between two powerful programs -- each trying to be the one to inflict its will and its version of reality upon the other.
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Carl Dubois has written or blogged about LSU sports since 1999, when Florida imposed its will upon the Tigers. You can contact him at carl1061 'at' gmail.com.
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Good read, Carl 
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