One of the best parts of living in the south is the jargon used.
“All y’all over yonder as busy as a cat on a hot tin roof throwin’ a hissy fit,” is a legitimate saying every southerner can understand. But it’s also hard to beat the classics like “cattywampus” and “bless your heart.”
A lot of them can be applied to what LSU coach Lane Kiffin said Monday about returning to Oxford for the first time since leaving Ole Miss in the middle of a hissyfit over not getting his way.
“I told the players today, ‘You don’t have anything to worry about as far as attention on you all week. There’s going to be so much attention, hatred and everything on me. You just get to go play’,” Kiffin said Monday. “I told them the pressure is really on Ole Miss.”
Kiffin is about as wrong as a screen door on a submarine saying Ole Miss is the one with the pressure in Saturday’s game. It’s not that Ole Miss doesn’t have any pressure at all. There’s a lot of pressure on the Rebels and Kiffin lays that part out well.
“They’re the team that won 13 games last year while we won seven. They returned two Heisman candidates,” he said. “They have the second-longest winning streak in the country. So, our guys just get to go play. The pressure isn’t on them.”
There absolutely is pressure on LSU and more so than what Ole Miss has.
There’s the pressure of proving moving from Oxford to Baton Rouge was the right decision. Not just for Kiffin but for TJ Dottery, Princewill Umanmielen, Devin Harper and Winston Watkins.
There’s the pressure of spending $50 million on a roster.
There’s the pressure of being the troublemaker on the block and whether or not that was worth it.
There’s the pressure of being a vehicle for a governor’s political ambitions.
There’s the pressure of being the renegade.
LSU and Kiffin have made unpopular choices outside of Baton Rouge that if the Tigers aren’t winning, what was all of that about?
Again, yes, Ole Miss is facing its own pressures. Losing to LSU would be painful for the fan base. It would hurt the Rebels’ playoff chances (but entirely destroy them). There’d be a round of “Kiffin was right to leave” euphoria from the Tigers’ fans.
But all of that would be over in a week. An LSU loss to Ole Miss is much more longer lasting because of all of things LSU has done over the last nine months.
Ole Miss would feel the sting of a loss, sure. But LSU is the one carrying the weight of nine months of noise.
Around here, we call that being “up a creek without a paddle,” and the Tigers are the ones who built the creek.
