The 1988 football schedule

From a name recognition standpoint, I doubt LSU has ever played a schedule as impressive as the one we played in 1988. The non-conference schedule included home games against Texas A&M and Miami, Fla., plus a road game at Ohio State. Tulane also visited Tiger Stadium. In SEC play, we had four road games at Tennessee, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi State, and only three home games against Auburn, Kentucky and Ole Miss. The first five games of the season read like this:

Texas A&M
@Tennessee
@Ohio State
@Florida
Auburn

The Tigers started out on fire, winning the first two, then a stunning come-from-behind upset by Ohio State broke the momentum, and Florida beat us in a lackluster effort by our offense. We bounced back from those two losses with a heroic upset of Auburn in the famed Earthquake Game to finish the 5-game opening murderers' row at 3-2. Then, we settled in to win four more in a row over Kentucky, Ole Miss, Alabama and Mississippi State to clinch the SEC title at 6-1 (7-2 overall). But Miami blew into town and blew us out 44-3 to drop us to 7-3 overall. We ended with a spanking of Tulane at home, but SEC co-champion Auburn (10-1) got the Sugar Bowl bid in spite of our having beaten them head to head, and we were sent off to the Hall of Fame Bowl in Florida, where we didn't show up and got hammered by Syracuse to complete an 8-4 season.

Some people have claimed that the blowout loss at home to Miami is what really broke the backs of that team and the program as a whole, as 1989 began a streak of six straight losing seasons. Incidentally, that Miami game was a replacement game. We were supposed to play SMU in that game, but they got hit with the NCAA death penalty, so we had to find another opponent. What might have happened if we hadn't played those games against Ohio State and Miami, but had played a couple of cupcakes instead? Do we go 10-1, get into the Sugar Bowl instead of Auburn, and use that as a springboard to another good season in 1989? Even as it was, we were a preseason top 10 pick going into 1989 before collapsing and finishing 4-7 to start the darkest period in our history.

Courageous scheduling might have been part of the reason for the downturn in our program at the end of the 1980s. Still, I'd love to see us play a schedule with those names on it these days.