Lane Kiffin was supposed to change everything at LSU. Instead, Alabama delivered a familiar nightmare

BATON ROUGE, La. — Down here on the Bayou, LSU fans realized it precisely with 3 minutes, 48 seconds remaining early on Saturday night, just after the sun went down, right when this place is usually at its most menacing: The season is likely lost.

Another fourth down had gone awry, the scoreboard was a lost cause and 102,000-plus emptied out of Tiger Stadium with lightning speed while boos and even a few profanities rained down from the stands. 

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Alabama and Kalen DeBoer had done it again — done it to LSU, done it in the vaunted building, done it to the $13 million coach who was brought in and given one of the most expensive rosters in the country to contend for titles and beat this specific opponent.

As a long list of coaches can tell you, you’re always on the clock at LSU. And in an avalanche of a fourth quarter that buried LSU, 31-13, the picture emerged of a program that isn’t getting what it signed up for when it gave Lane Kiffin everything he ever wanted.

“No, I did not think that,” Kiffin said when asked if LSU’s 6-3 record reflected how good this team was supposed to be. “But it is where we are. And, you know, can’t change that.”

It is unfair to Alabama, in some ways, that the story Saturday night once again was Kiffin. Then again, it’s always Kiffin and rarely his Alabama counterpart Kalen DeBoer, which is very much how he likes it. 

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Kiffin wanted LSU because the upside and the potential for disaster are both so great, and there’s rarely much in between. That was always going to be a reality show of its own, but eventually there’s no separation between the results and the narrative.

Kiffin made the pregame “Tiger Walk” flanked by Shaquille O’Neal, Angel Reese, Paul Skenes and Kevin Costner. He left the field by himself, now 0-6 against Alabama at three different schools, hearing the insults from a fan base wondering how $100 million was spent to continue getting Brian Kelly-level results.

The SEC is unforgiving in that regard. As DeBoer nears the end of his third season following Nick Saban, his program has had some bad and, frankly, explicable nights, too.

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It’s why even now, as the Alabama administration screams to anyone who will listen that he’s their guy, the college football industry still buzzes about DeBoer running to safety because he’s had enough of the SEC. 

But understand this: Games like this show you why there isn’t a soul at Alabama who would volunteer to trade coaches with LSU. 

“There was just a feeling and when we get our complete team together, and we’re still not there yet and maybe never will be, there’s a confidence that grows,” DeBoer said. “You could just feel it. You could just listen to a practice and the pads are popping and there’s chatter and good juice.”

DeBoer is now 3-0 against LSU and 2-0 in Tiger Stadium. He’s got 10 wins against ranked teams, two against Georgia, now one over Kiffin. And every time you wonder whether there’s trouble around the bend, as it appeared there might be when Alabama limped into its bye week, DeBoer manages to conjure a masterpiece. 

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That’s why he’s the coach at Alabama. And trying to beat him is why LSU unloaded the bank account of a small country to chase the Kiffin high.

There are, of course, very good reasons as to why the governor of Louisiana decided to blow up the school’s entire athletic department and unload its bank account to hire Kiffin. He won 50 games in five years at Ole Miss, finally got the Rebels to the playoffs last year (although he was so eager to leave for LSU that he bailed on the postseason), found players like Trinidad Chambliss in the transfer portal and has always carried himself with an awkward charisma that intoxicates athletic administrators into believing he’s onto something that others are not. 

But for all his undeniable coaching talent, even the largesse of LSU cannot stop Kiffin from getting in his own way. Down 10-3 late in the second quarter, Kiffin pulled a classic Kiffin: Instead of accepting a 26-yard field goal at a point in the game where it would make sense, he went for it on fourth-and-4 and did not convert. 

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He tried it three more times Saturday with exactly the same results. 

“Kind of felt like [the game] was probably going to be more high scoring than it ended up being through three quarters,” Kiffin said. “Just kind of felt like there was a time there where field goals weren’t going to win the game.”

Kiffin, who is now 0-6 in his career against Alabama at three different schools, gets paid $13 million for his feelings to be a little more on the money than that. 

One way or another, the final blow that Alabama delivered Saturday night will be an inflection point for Kiffin’s season and perhaps even his entire tenure here.

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At one point late in the third quarter, despite winning the stat sheet all night, LSU finally scored a touchdown to take a 13-10 lead. It felt like the LSU team these fans had been promised since its offseason transfer portal spending spree might finally be showing itself in a big game. 

“We take the lead with all the stuff we did wrong earlier in the game,” Kiffin said, “and then when the stadium was ready to help take over, we play a really bad 18 minutes of football.”

The fourth quarter? It was sheer demoralization, delivered with precision and glee by an Alabama team that now just needs to avoid something catastrophic against Vanderbilt, Chattanooga and Auburn to make the College Football Playoff. 

As for LSU? Maybe it’ll beat Texas at home next week, win at Tennessee the week after that and find its way back into the conversation. More likely, though, Kiffin’s first season here seems destined to be one of college football’s most expensive lemons.

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“There’s a lot of outside noise about whatever anybody thinks about it,” linebacker TJ Dottery said. “I’m going to stick with my guys. I believe in us wholeheartedly. Whatever the record is, we go back to work and look at it as a new opportunity.”

In this era of college football, every loss cannot be a referendum. There is too much parity, too little depth on each roster, too much postseason opportunity now to scream about firing the coach every time something goes wrong. That’s probably what Alabama’s administration has done best in the DeBoer era. Understanding it would be an adjustment for fans after Nick Saban’s decade-plus of domination, they have made it clear both contractually and vocally that DeBoer is their guy and they won’t indulge the outrage game because of a two-game losing streak. 

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Will LSU have that same organizational discipline if Kiffin’s first season ends up as much of a bust as it’s currently on track to be? Will the school that just paid Brian Kelly’s $54 million buyout because it planned to buy its way to a championship take this possible first-year humiliation in stride? 

Louisiana is a complicated and culturally rich place, but some things in this state are simple. Nobody likes being duped. As Death Valley emptied Saturday night into an uncomfortable silence, it wasn’t so much the LSU season that shattered but rather the illusion of something different that this school had spent ridiculous amounts of money to purchase.

Instead, it was all too familiar. The same Alabama-LSU rivalry going sideways, the same disappointment of a playoff bid slipping away and mostly the same Kiffin siphoning off all the attention while delivering a big-game dud.

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: Sports.yahoo.com