Pride on line

• By RANDY ROSETTA
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Nov 28, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

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

After years of heading into  Thanksgiving week with this on the line or that to play for and usually with a team playing its best football of the season, there has been a perplexing aura of “What now?” for the LSU players this week.

None of those elements really apply today when the Tigers — their pride wounded — head north to Little Rock to face Arkansas at 1:30 p.m. at War Memorial Stadium.

Stripped down to its foundation, today’s game is basically all about pride for LSU (7-4, 3-4 SEC) and Arkansas (4-7, 1-6) in the 14th annual Battle for the Golden Boot.

Who thought the 4-foot, 175-pound, 24-karat gold monster of a trophy would mean so much all of a sudden?

Yeah, the Tigers are still jockeying for bowl position, their eyes aimed at the Cotton Bowl or Outback Bowl under best-case scenarios and the Chick-fil-A Bowl as a landing zone otherwise. 

But LSU became an also-ran in a bid for a repeat national championship with lopsided October losses to Florida and Georgia and exited the SEC Championship Game derby three weeks ago with an overtime loss to No. 1-ranked Alabama. 

Unranked for the first time since the end of the 2002 season, the Tigers limp into the regular-season finale after a humbling, could-have-been-much-worse 31-13 loss at home to Ole Miss last week.

Three weeks of talking about staying focused and on finishing strong have dissolved into an explanation of exactly what the Tigers can salvage from the 2008 season.

“A win,” LSU left tackle Ciron Black said flatly. “We want to win. Nobody wants to lose a game. It’s LSU, and we’re not used to losing. We hate to lose.”

Until this season, the current crop of Tigers players and coaches haven’t stumbled much. In LSU coach Les Miles’ first three seasons, the Tigers lost six games total, only two after mid-October.

This fall LSU hasn’t won consecutive games since late September and the last SEC triumph was at South Carolina six weeks ago. The three-game league losing skid — all at home — is the Tigers’ longest since 1999 when they lost their first seven SEC games to swing the door open for Gerry DiNardo’s ouster.

Which leads to “What now?”

“It’s hard,” Black said. “It’s different. That’s where your leaders step up and where Coach comes in and settles everybody down and makes you realize we still have stuff to play for.”