College Football Angst Watch 2024: Week 11 (Geaux Tigers)
An Open Letter to Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.
Angst Watch is a weekly recap of the existential misery caused by college football. It’s also my ongoing tracking of Colorado, USC, Texas A&M, and Ohio State, four programs I thought were going to cause their fanbases a great deal of misery.
This week, though, it’s an open letter to Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.
The State of Angst
Dear Jeff,
What’s up, dude? I hear you’re the governor of a state the looks like a boot. That’s crazy, man.
Anyway, I wanted to reach out because I heard you were instrumental in having the Louisiana State Tigers revive their tradition of having a live tiger in a cage on the sideline this past weekend. I read somewhere there’s this urban legend that the team supposed to score a touchdown for each time the tiger roars during the pregame. I didn’t watch, but it must’ve been a pretty quiet sideline since the football team got boat raced out of the building by a score of 42-13.
This wasn’t the university’s doing, though. Not as far as I understand it. They didn’t want it there, reportedly, in the interest of animal welfare. They didn’t think it would be right to have it screamed at by 100,000 football fans, harrassed by cheerleaders, and forced to watch the LSU Tigers get boat raced out of the building by a score of 42-13.
But reportedly you kept pushing for it, and you got what you wanted.
According to an article in The Advocate, Louisiana State University authorized a political action committee, Protect Louisiana Values, present a tiger at the game. Their website describes them as “a nonprofit organization that advocates through education and public policy to protect the five pillars of our community: children, education, families, businesses, and public safety.”
But that’s no ordinary nonprofit. That’s your political action committee. Which of the five pillars does “revive goofy tiger tradition” falls under? Public safety? Children if the tiger hasn’t had lunch?
A lot of people are criticizing you for your involvement here, but I don’t want to do that. I’ve never been one for jumping on bandwagons. All I want to know is why you cared so much about getting a live tiger back into the stadium.
I don’t pay attention to LSU football very closely, but I don’t think anybody was clamoring for this. I started following the sport around 2014 and when they dumped the tiger tradition in 2015, I don’t recall anybody really caring. Nobody has made a significant stink about this. A brave man than me will have to scour the LSU message board called TigerDroppings so we can know for sure.
I could maybe understand if you were an alum, but you didn’t go to LSU! You’re a graduate of Louisiana University-Monroe. They have their own football team. They’re having a really good season! They’re probably going to win the Sun Belt Conference! Think of all the distractions you could cause them!
The only answer I can figure is you have a donor who is up your butt about this. Someone Foghorn Leghorn sounding curmudgeon took out his checkbook in front of you and said, “I say, I say, I say, if you want my money, you gotta bring a live tiger back to the Tigers’s sideline!”
I need to know who it is. I need to know who conditioned their donation, a sum that I have to imagine is not insignificant based on how far you were willing to push this, on you strong arming a Public land-grant research university into reviving a silly football tradition.
I’ll make this easy for you. I think I know who it was. Was it Ed Orgeron? You remember him. He was the head coach in 2019 when the LSU Tigers won a national championship on the back of a historically productive offense, and then lead the team into definitional mediocrity for two years before he got fired and allegedly hit on a university official’s pregnant wife.
Was it Ed? I bet it was Ed. Look, just blink once for yes and twice for no when you walk up to the podium for your next press conference. It can be our little secret. I won’t post about it on TigerDroppings, I swear.
Eagerly awaiting your reply,
Dan Plagens