re: This is not Tigers Baseball year

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Let the coaches coach, and the players play...LSU baseball is still one of the best programs in the country, it's just that everyone is modeling their program after us and some are catching up to us

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When LSU was the model program in the country, we had a lot of natural advantages. We took baseball more seriously than almost everybody else. We got the best players, had the best coach, and the game was designed so that we could impose our will and just mash other teams into submission.

Now things are changing and we're not adjusting. Schools take it more seriously. Talent is balancing out, overall management is better, and the most successful teams have adopted to the new rules. LSU still has the raw talent to reach Super Regionals and occasionally reach Omaha. But once we get there, things don't go our way, we press, and we get oucoached.

The UCLA CWS game is the textbook example of that. UCLA could barely hit the ball out of the infield and they beat us. Meanwhile, we're trying to hit tape measure home runs every time we step to the plate and the balls and bats are now rigged to keep that from happening. UCLA knew that and we didn't. So the UCLA pitcher kept everything high in the zone and we took the bait and lost the game. They refused to lay off the pitches. They refused to manufacture runs. UCLA did it, LSU made one mistake in the field, and the game was over.

And you can point to lots of other times when LSU appeared to have superior talent and did nothing with it. Stony Brook. Houston. TCU. And in most of those cases, LSU folded like a card table the first time they got punched in the mouth, and it got ugly early on.