GREEN BAY, Wis. — Meanwhile, Alabama threw a true freshman quarterback into the first college game he ever dressed out for, and he verily torched Southern Cal.
How does this happen?
Where do these quarterbacks grow? Are there late-night informercials hawking them?
Really, they seem to be so readily available everywhere but the Baton Rouge campus of Louisiana State University, which is proudly both a land grant and sea grant college but can’t seem to toss a simple football in the air.
The Crimson Tide actually used three quarterbacks altogether — didn’t really seem to matter — but the youngest of the bunch, a raw kid named Jalen Hurts, got the oohs and aahs and looks like the heir apparent for the next wave of Bama championships.
Just like that.
After one game.
Dangdest thing.
Snap your fingers — Get out there kid, let’s see what you got. Voila! Alabama 52, Southern Cal 6.
While at LSU? ... Kerplunk. Dumpster fire. Wisconsin 16, LSU 14.
OK, this isn’t really about Brandon Harris.
True, despite spring and August assurances to the contrary, he didn’t look a whole lot different Saturday than from his struggles in the past while LSU was ... uh ... not sure exactly what the Tigers were doing other than stinking up a legendary stadium and an otherwise gorgeous day for football.
Only sporadically did it look much like football. The Tigers spent the day looking stunned, frustrated, confused and, in one ugly incident to cap it all, guilty of assault and battery by forearm clothes line.
Yeah, Harris ultimately threw an awful interception that killed LSU’s last chance at victory (and if the Tigers had somehow won that game, they’d also be under investigation for grand larceny).
But at least this time Harris didn’t have to avoid eye contact with teammates in the somber aftermath. For his career, of course, his true position has seemingly been Designated Missing Piece of a talented puzzle, most of them former 4- and 5-star recruits.
Not anymore.
Harris may still be a symptom, but it’s a much bigger problem than the most important position on most football fields.
That’s not the excuse anymore.
At least they’re all in this together.
Who was going to point a finger at Harris Saturday?
The offensive line?
They couldn’t block anything in red — and this wasn’t Alabama, it was a patched-together (but very well-coached) Wisconsin front seven.
Receivers?
They didn’t help Harris much, with a couple of key drops and several other catches that would be have been made if these guys are the sure shots for the NFL that has been suggested.
There are even limits, it turns out, to what Leonard Fournette can do all by himself.
The LSU defense? It was OK, mostly better than OK.
The defense actually showed a lot of promise in scoring half of the Tigers’ points and force-feeding the other touchdown with a turnover.
Bottom line, it was the first time in four years that the Tigers gave up 16 or fewer points and didn’t win the game.
It was encouraging, especially considering it was the first test drive of new defensive coordinator Dave Aranda’s totally different alignment.
Oh, but wait ...
Wasn’t this supposed to be, if not a new offense, at least a severely tweaked one?
Surely, you jest.
And how naive you were.
It was the same old stuff.
If there’s any finger-pointing to do, it should be at a coaching staff, mostly Les Miles, that now, nine months after getting a reprieve, has some explaining to do.
It may be too late.
If Miles wasn’t shocked out of his stone age offense by last November’s near-firing, it may never happen.
But fans — not to mention an overwhelmed offensive line, a swarmed Heisman contender and a scapegoat quarterback — deserve better.
When Miles survived last November’s coup attempt, if he didn’t outright promise it, he at least implied that they’d take a long, hard look at this archaic offense, dump the remedial passing game and join the 21st Century.
The staff did, in fact, visit several college outposts where the forward pass is not only tolerated but openly encouraged — often with three, four, even five wide receivers in play at once — and the trendy spread alignments are used to open up things as effectively as three or four more blocking tight ends crammed into the scrum.
They looked around. Evidently they were only window-shopping.
Saturday the solution to constantly having more Badgers than LSU could block was to beef up the dreaded jumbo package like the most stubborn Bo Schembechler disciple extant.
It’s mind-boggling.
But, one way or another, Miles better figure it out.
The sympathy vote isn’t likely to come rolling in late from the country precincts this time.
Follow Scooter Hobbs on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ScooterAmPress
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