Mediocrity of LSU Football - I miss being a top 10 team

This post is inspired by me just poking around LSU's season history [ source] and not even realizing that we finished unranked this year (in my defense, I'm a peace corps volunteer in rural panama, hard for me to keep up super close with most things stateside). I then realized that despite winning the SEC West and the Heisman in Kelly's first two years, we finished outside the top ten both times. I find it ironic that we fired Miles in 2016 for mediocrity (0.692 record over 4 seasons post-2011, highest rank 14, one finish outside top 25) and then almost a decade later are paying 10 million a year for a similar product (0.725, highest finish 12, finishing unranked last year while the team he left for not having the "resources" to compete played in the Natty)

In the first 11 years of my life, we finished top ten 7 times... in the 13 years since then we have finished in the top 10 only twice, both with Ed O and Joe Burrow. without burrow, we have 0 top ten finishes. Schools like UCF and Cincy have just as many and TCU and Michigan State have double our top 10 final rankings during that time. [ LINK]

Obviously we fairly recently won the natty (which was the best season ever and i think still worth a handful of mediocre seasons but now feels like a bit of a flash in the pan). But because of that natty, I think I just didn't realize the decade of mediocrity that LSU football has had outside of that. It perpetually feels like next year is the year and I miss my childhood when LSU consistently was in the cream of the crop. I'm genuinely hopeful Kelly can right the ship starting this year but it really feels like we're still trying to shake off the 2011 curse

Look I'm not a negatiger. I guess it just didn't dawn on me before the struggles we've had this past decade and I'm out here feeling nostalgic. I just don't want to become one of those schools that merely accepts mediocrity as the new norm and expectation :/