re: Most Difficult National Championship to bring back to BR

Basketball - most difficult, since we haven't won one yet, and we have had teams capable of doing it. This "inferrior facility" angle is hog wash.

Baseball - harder, like some of you said, so many games, but the double elimination is a plus. A team can loose as many as 4 games, once tournament play starts, and win the championship, plus the tigers have history on their side in this sport. Yes, it does help.

Football - Hard to win, but to loose the last regular season game, which made the 2nd loss, and still play for the NC, all I can say is, thank the BCS god's and the human polls for that one.

Equestrian...saw where Aubrun brought home the National title this year....why can't we?

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wrong. Auburn was in the CWS in 1997. I know, I was there, and I'm pretty sure that makes them close to winning. Auburn also won the SEC in basketball in 1999, but choked in the tournament

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Yes, I was there too, hell almost everbody in the SEC West was there that year too, but still Auburn wasn't really close to winning it.

Sure Auburn had Chris Porter, but didn't make a huge splash in the Tournament, again, not really that close.

Ole Miss.

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ole miss may have yet to make the cws (they're a bunch of chokers),

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True, Bianco is a good coach. In football Houston will have them consistently in the Top 20 or so, IMHO. Kennedy looks solid, just not the public relations person, but the guy can coach. Actually things are looking up for the Rebels these days. Kinda surprising.

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Vandy-Nothing close,

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they did lose out in the regional, but they were the #1 overall seed in 07

Florida had a very special run primarily because they had 3 NBA draft picks (ETC: Green was not a 1st round pick) who also happened to have family wealth by virtue of their fathers' prior professional sport experience. Thusly, there was no need for them to go pro early.

Adding Brewer and the white sharpshooter to the mix will result in consecutive championships all of the time.

Florida won absolutely nothing with Roberson, Walsh, and Lee, who are great college players in their own right.

LSU's NBA prospects came from broken homes and in squalor.

Has to be Softball!

Since LSU has won the last hardball NC trophy they've won 2 BCS NC's. It's pretty obvious that basketball is the most difficult.

I find that over time (I'm 38), watching March Madness on tv and the internet makes it more dramatic and personal b/c you can watch every game if you want to.

If a team wins a certain way, it seems to have a lot of staying power in peoples memories for some reason.

I wanted it BAD in '86 MAN!! frick YOU PERVIS!!

sorry if Germans

If this stupid basketball team wins it all this year, I'll catapult into a zone of fandomhood that will be as sweet as any of the BCS wins IMO.
Plus, I haven't experienced it yet.

LSU winning hockey would be super sweet too. (does USC have a hockey team??)



Here's the thing,.. You can get prepared for the BCS games, but you can't get prepared for the suddenness of winning so many HUMONGOUS games in so little time, then after those games, winning it all! I want that.

Freak us all out please, team.

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2. NCAA Tournament

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IMHO, this should be 1. if for no other reason there are soooo many more schools at the D1 lever, many w/o FB programs that can just pour money into their BB team.

There are a lot of ways to look at this. In a numbers sense, football has less competition (only 119 other teams as opposed to the 300+ playing Div. I basketball and baseball). On the other hand, no other sport comes close to the investment top schools put into football, so the competition level in that sense is much higher. Also, the formats (as have been discussed) have an impact and create more different ways of looking at it. The Baseball playoffs, with a 64 team double elimination tournament, are (imo) the most likely to produce the best team in the country as the champion. Thus, in order to win that one, you pretty much have to actually be the best team in the country which is very hard. On the other hand, Basketball has a 64 team single-elimination tournament, which almost guarantees multiple upsets and greatly reduces the chance that the truly best team actually wins the championship. Thus, it requires a substantial amount of luck that is impossible to control. So in that sense, it is also very hard. Football has the BCS, which involves many factors that -- like luck -- are not truly controllable by the teams, but are also not random (e.g., the polls). Thus, the system in football has an inherent opportunity for bias making it harder for some teams to win it than others. Combined with the luck needed to survive a season where one loss can easily eliminate you from contention and two will almost certainly do it, plus the incredible investment of resources by the top level teams, and there are more ways to screw up a football championship bid than either of the other two.

In the end, I think it is harder in general for a school to win a championship in football because it requires the highest investment of resources to achieve (which in my opinion is the best measure of difficulty). For LSU specifically, given the way we have allocated resources, I think Basketball will be the hardest to achieve because it is the one least likely to ascend to the level of being the best team in the country, and even if it did it would still require a significant amount of luck to win it. And while the luck factor would serve to help our odds while we are not the best team, that help is distributed equally among the hundreds of teams in competition, and especially the other 63 teams in the tourney (besides us and the true "best team").