BATON ROUGE -- LSU has become the life of the party in the Southeastern Conference.
Yes, just a week after bringing party favors to Vanderbilt's official coronation as a contender -- yes, that Vanderbilt -- the Tigers were back home Saturday, opening up their famed Death Valley man cave for Texas A&M to party like it was 1994.
That was the last time the Aggies had won in Tiger Stadium, a factoid all the more amazing considering how incredibly, ridiculously easy A&M made it look Saturday night.
In LSU's case, embarrassingly easy.
Texas A&M basically ran the Tigers out of their own stadium -- or, at least the Aggies ran the fans out via a third-quarter mass evacuation.
It paved the way for an Aggie takeover of Tiger Stadium, and the host student section was welcoming enough to invite their khaki counterparts in for late night fun and fellowship.
Or maybe the LSU students were just unable to put up any more resistance than their varsity.
It is not hard to figure out LSU's dilemma in football terms. Basic football. Fundamentals.
They're in short supply.
LSU has an offense that cannot block. Not a lick. The Tigers try to make up for it with a defense that cannot tackle. Anybody. Least of all any quarterback with half a motor.
Combine those two and you get what Brian Kelly -- henceforth known as "embattled head coach" -- admitted was the wrong kind of "complementary football."
For that kind of daily double there aren't many workarounds.
Translation: Train wreck, Texas A&M 49, LSU 25.
And a once-promising season gone down the tubes. Kelly's future in doubt -- $53 million buyout be danged. Some kind of coaching changes virtually assured, probably sooner than later.
It was so much simpler when it was just a struggling offense being propped up by a much improved defense.
Now it's shared misery.
Saturday that defense seemed to be chasing and bad-angling and whiffing all night -- can anybody on this team wrap up? It wasn't limited to the actual defense either. The lowlight came when they turned Aggies' punt returner KC Concepcion into 79 yards worth of the Billy Cannon highlight, only morphed to living color from the grainy black and white.
"I wish I had a simple answer for you," Kelly said when asked when his team forgot how to tackle.
It got so bad it looked like the Aggies scored their final touchdown by accident, while trying to just run out the clock.
How much longer can you bear watching that excruciating struggle to squeeze points out of a dry turnip?
All the while the Aggies were making it look so easy with well designed plays.
Once LSU gets that jump-ball touchdown pass to Tre'Dez Green out of the way, they seem to be on their own. Fresh out of ideas.
It's not (embattled) coordinator Joe Sloan's play-calling as much as much as the play design.
How many times are they going to dial up that cross-field pass that has to carry 30 yards to the opposite sideline to gain, best case scenario, two or three yards?
Of course, it's hard to call (or draw up) plays that require virtually no blocking from the offensive line.
It's a unit whose sole job, apparently, is to peel quarterback Garrett Nussmeier back up off the turf after he's been flattened and planted.
That part, they must practice -- they've got it down pat. It's become instinctive.
Finally, in the final five minutes when Nussmeier was buried yet again (and dutifully helped to his feet) for the fifth time, Kelly, citing humanitarian grounds, relieved him.
"We were struggling with protection," Kelly explained. "The game was clearly out of reach. To have him get injured in that situation, I thought, would have been malpractice from my standpoint."
That allowed a garbage-time cameo for backup Michael Van Buren, who threw a scoring pass and was also sacked twice to give the Aggies seven for the night.
That's not an excuse for the Tigers. The real question should be how the Tigers got themselves into such desperate straits to begin with.
Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. Contact him at [email protected]