• By GARY LANEY
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Nov 15, 2009

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The boos cascaded on Jarett Lee on Saturday night at Tiger Stadium.

He might as well have been a Southeastern Conference replay official for the way he was treated by his own crowd.

Lee, the former starter filling in for the injured Jordan Jefferson, was booed when he threw most of his 15 incompletions. He was heckled when he took an intentional grounding by disposing of a pass to nowhere in particular.

And it wasn’t just him.

Offensive coordinator Gary Crowton was given the same salute when he’d call a pass play on first-and-10 instead of giving it to running back Keiland Williams on what was Williams’ best night of the season. And head coach Les Miles got the Bronx cheer when, after a couple of nice plays with Russell Shepard taking the snaps in the Wildcat, he put Lee back in the game.

As Lee struggled in his first — and perhaps only — start of the 2009 season, the crowd turned on the former starting quarterback turned fan-base pariah more and more. Whoever said it never rains in Tiger Stadium wasn’t standing in Lee’s shoes in the fourth quarter when all the negative energy 70,000 fans — the crowd had dwindled as many had already shown their displeasure with their feet — can muster was falling toward his shoulders in a deluge. It was the kind of negative energy the visiting team never felt on this night.

Granted, it was just little Louisiana Tech on the other sideline, an opponent that draws complete indifference from most Tigers fans. There will never be that sort of indifference in Baton Rouge over what happens under center for LSU.

But here’s the punch line.

For all the abuse he took from the crowd Saturday night, Jarrett Lee was the winning quarterback in LSU’s 24-16 win.

When you try to reconcile the treatment with the result, you come up with a lot of things about LSU and Lee, some of it good, some of it not good, some of it ugly.

To be clear, the main thing that wasn’t good Saturday was Lee’s performance. The sophomore was out of sync with his receivers. Sometimes they would zig when he thought they would zag, and that would result in ugly passes to nowhere. Sometimes he’d overthrow the deep ball. Other times, he’d just miss. To his credit, he was turnover-free, but he did flirt with a couple of interceptions.

It added up to a 7-for-22, 105-yard night that’s not going down among the best performances in LSU history.

That’s the bad. What is good is LSU’s place in college football. If the Tigers hadn’t won two national championships this decade, there wouldn’t be such a high expectation for perfection.