Rabalais: LSU at ease sans Perrilloux

• By SCOTT RABALAIS
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Aug 7, 2008 - Page: 1C - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

Ryan Perrilloux’s former LSU teammates miss him personally. His disarming smile. His talented, particle accelerator arm.

They wish him well in his new venue, Jacksonville (Ala.) State, a Football Championship Subdivision school that is hundreds of miles and light years from the big-time program that could have been Perrilloux’s to lead at LSU. Some still keep in touch with him.

But you get the impression they don’t wish Perrilloux was still here.

Instead, you get the sense that whatever the Tigers have lost in talent, they’ve gained in peace of mind.

“Oh, yeah,” wide receiver Demetrius Byrd began bluntly. “The mood has been more settled since we started summer workouts because we know we’ve got stuff to do — and we can’t have one person stop the show.”

On the football field, the Ryan Perrilloux show could be mesmerizing. His high school coach, Larry Dauterive, worked with Doug Flutie in the CFL, and he said Perrilloux was better than the Heisman winner. In the glimpses you saw of Perrilloux — his running, his throwing, the way he tamed himself to win the SEC Championship Game and the game’s MVP award last year — you could easily believe Dauterive’s boast.

But off the field. That was where the steep price of renting Perrilloux’s talent came due. And the price of admission to the Ryan Perrilloux show became too much.

“We were tired,” offensive guard Herman Johnson said. “Every other week we’d hear about something he’d done. Everybody’s asking you, ‘What’s the deal with Perrilloux?’ everywhere you’d go. It just got old to me. I got tired of hearing it.

“We try to protect everybody’s image. But there’s only so much you can do.”

Only so much you can do, as Byrd said, with “someone who didn’t care about their own self.”

Eventually, the players figured out how to mentally bypass the mounting Perrilloux distractions. As if they crossed him off the roster before Les Miles did.

“If a guy gets in trouble once, you’re already making sure he has a backup,” tight end Richard Dickson said. “It’s not really a distraction if you know the situation.”

There will almost certainly be a situation this fall when LSU will need a clutch drive for a score that Perrilloux probably could have delivered. A score that may be beyond the scope of experience that Andrew Hatch, Jarrett Lee or Jordan Jefferson now possess.