LSU 51, Clemson 10. In Lane Kiffin’s first game as the head coach at LSU, in Tiger Stadium, against Clemson. That is about as loud an introduction as a coach can make.
The number that explains it is 644. LSU put up 644 yards of total offense on Sept. 5 and dominated all three phases of the game. Not one unit carrying the others. All of it, at once, in a season opener against a real opponent.
Season openers are supposed to be sloppy. New rosters, new staffs, timing that has not caught up to game speed. LSU played like a team that had been running this offense for two years.
Sam Leavitt was the story on the field. In his LSU debut, he was outstanding, and that matters more than any single stat because of what it says about fit. Kiffin’s reputation is built on offensive design, and offensive design only works if the quarterback can execute it immediately. Leavitt looked like he had been in the system far longer than he has.
Now consider the circumstances, because they make the performance stranger and better.
Kickoff was 8:40 p.m. CT after a weather delay, the latest start in LSU history. That is a nightmare scenario for a team playing its first game under a new coach. Delays wreck warmup routines, wreck pregame timing, and give a young roster hours to sit around getting tight. Plenty of teams come out flat after that. LSU came out and hung 51.
The off-field backdrop was worse. Headlines in Baton Rouge had been dominated by a legal battle between the school and the SEC over the eligibility of players who had previously declared for the NFL Draft and spent the summer in NFL training camps. That is the kind of story that consumes a program in August and follows it into September.
So the team that just went out and won by 41 spent its preseason with a lawsuit in the headlines and then sat through a weather delay before kicking off near 9 p.m. That context is what turns a big win into a statement about the coaching staff.
The obvious caution: it is one game, and it is Week 1. Nobody should be crowning a team on the first Saturday. LSU entered the season ranked No. 11, and one result does not rewrite a schedule.
But I would push back on the reflexive “it’s just one game” dismissal here. What we are evaluating in a debut is not whether a team will win a championship. It is whether the new operation works. A 41-point margin, 644 yards, a quarterback who looked comfortable from the first drive, and complete control in every phase is a lot of evidence about the operation.
The next real test on the calendar is already circled. Kiffin returns to Ole Miss as LSU’s coach on Sept. 19. There is not a more loaded date on his schedule, and after this opener, the whole sport will be watching it.
My take: LSU has one of the two best arguments in the sport for moving up in the rankings, and Kiffin just answered the only question people had about the hire. He was always going to build a good offense. What he showed on Sept. 5 was a team that plays hard in every phase, in bad conditions, with noise all around it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
