Alan Risher: "Twelve Years of Suffering"

Seeing Alan Risher's name on another thread, I'm reminded of this paragraph on the 1982 season in Bob Brodhead's autobiography.

The team came back with three impressive performances against Kentucky, South Carolina, and Mississippi to up its record to 6-0-1, then handed the Alabama Crimson Tide what Coach Paul "Bear" Bryant called "the best beating we've had since the 60s," 20-10 in Birmingham.

Not since 1970 had an LSU team defeated the Crimson Tide, but on that brilliant November afternoon, the Tigers outclassed Bryant's charges to end what LSU quarterback Alan Risher aptly called "twelve years of suffering."

Two thoughts:

1) We're almost halfway there to twelve straight defeats to Alabama. I hope we break the streak long before then.

2) Some of you people so willing now to change your narrative and say that it doesn't matter, that we should just accept that we're not as good as Alabama, you don't understand what you're asking for.

Bama's dominance was like a bone in the throat to LSU's program in the seventies. It is again. We can bitch about the bad luck of being in the same division with the greatest college coach of all time, or, if we claim to be any kind of "elite" program at all, we pull out all the stops to try and compete with and beat them.

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So Alan Risher thinks he can do a better job of playcalling now? Maybe he can and maybe he can't. But he aptly described what it was like--and what it would be like--to lose to fricking Alabama for a decade or more.