Because of NCAA rules, LSU not playing exhibitions

• By GARY LANEY
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: Nov 4, 2009 - Page: 1C

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LSU’s first basketball game is still more than a week away when the University of Louisiana at Monroe visits Nov. 13.

But it won’t be the first time the Tigers play against another opponent, just the first time anybody from outside gets to see it or hear a score.

The Tigers went to South Alabama on Sunday for a scrimmage that was played behind closed doors because of NCAA rules.

In a part of the season where teams used to play exhibition games, the closed-door scrimmage has become a favored option.

That’s mainly because it’s no longer within NCAA rules to play touring teams. The options now are to play exhibition games (open to the public) against college teams not in NCAA Division I or, like LSU, choose the closed-door, no publicity scrimmage against Division I teams.

So while everybody else was thinking about football, the Tigers made the drive to Mobile, Ala., on Sunday and played Ronnie Arrow’s Jaguars.

“There were some good things in the scrimmage and some bad things,” coach Trent Johnson said, explaining the details he can offer are sketchy because NCAA rules technically don’t allow statistics or scores to be kept. Johnson said in three such scrimmages LSU has played in the past two years — last season LSU played at Tulane and UNO — scores and statistics were kept.

Evidently, the statistics that were kept in Mobile were, in Johnson’s words “favorable to us in standpoint of score.”

But how did LSU play?

Details are sketchy at best, but Johnson could offer this: “Considering the fact that we got on the bus around 10 (a.m.) and got there around 2:30 (p.m.) and started playing about 35 minutes (later), we were OK,” he said.

Johnson said that doesn’t mean the young Tigers, who have two returning starters back from last season’s Southeastern Conference champion and are breaking in seven first-year players, are where they need to be this close to the season opener.

The coach said if that were the case “everybody would be healthy, we’d be operating on all cylinders and all those things,” he said. “But that doesn’t matter. Ten days from now we are going to line up and play, regardless of what the situation is.”

Before then, Johnson said he would like to see his team progress in a lot of areas, including some deficiencies that the South Alabama scrimmage helped expose.