re: If LSU "O" moves to 40 out of 120, what will be our 2010 record?

This infatuation with our offensive ranking is still kinda bizarre to me. So many things go into that. You can have a good and effective offense, that doesn't necessarily rank that high for a variety of reasons.

1) The SEC schedule. Being #40 playing an SEC schedule is not the same as being #40 playing a WAC schedule. That's why anybody who believed we had the 112th "best" offense last year instead of just the 112th "ranked" offense, couldn't really be taken seriously

2) OOC schedule. We are replacing 2 pad-your-stats cupcakes with North Carolina and West Virginia. Even if we score points on those teams, the cumulative effect of not having a couple more games to rest players, may take it's toll by the end of the season

3) Special teams. I expect our return teams to score a few times this year, taking the ball out of our offense's hands. Also, I expect them to give short fields sometimes when they dont' house kicks.

4) Defensive big plays. Like our special teams, I think our defense is going to be a big play defense that not only houses a few scores themselves, but also gives our offense short fields turnovers.

5) If we're good, we should be up in the 4th quarter a lot and just pounding the ball on the ground to run out the clock. (I know we had the lead late a lot last year, but most of those games were still close, so we had to continue to try to score rather than just run out clock)


Our offense was atrocious last year. I didn't need a scarlet "112" to tell me that. Our offense could be very good this year, and I won't need some arbitrary "40" to tell me that. Especially when that ranking is amongst the WAC, Mountain West, and Sun Belt conference members. Again, this fascination with our total offense ranking is very strange to me. If anything, the stat that matters is where we rank in points per game.