As most have said on here, we all agree that LSU should never play these rent a win games. I do think that with the other conferences, and some of the impending changes that could restructure some of them, that we will start to see these games deminish. When other conferences are starting to play less of these types of games, we will be forced to try and keep them off of the schedule. The SEC SOS will not be enough to float by itself. JMO.
I voted for playing Southern. I would rather not play any FBS school. However if we have too, why waste the money on Middle Tenn State?
For the people who talk about a cross town rivalry thing, there's absolutely no competition. No disrespect to the Southern Jags, one of my best friends played football there in the late 90s, but the athletes are far superior south of I-10. LSU has nothing to prove here. I can see keeping the money in state, and in this case, in parish, as opposed to scheduling schools from out of state. Playing this game would be a bad business decision IMO. Strength of schedule would suffer without a legit OOC opponent. (Think the traffic's bad on gameday now? Just think what it would be like if Southern played @ LSU!)
I don't want to play Southern, just as I don't want to play Mcneese, ULM, The Citadel, and any other 1AA school out there. It doesn't seem to do anything in terms of preparing us for more difficult teams, and if, by some bizarre circumstance, all of our players blew it and we lost that game, it creates a stigma that lasts the rest of the season. I would rather pick any of the 1A schools; there are several of them that we can maul. If we do have to play a 1AA school though, whatever the reason, Southern is on the other side of town and is hard to argue against. I hope it wouldn't turn into a ''rivalry'' though.
I disagree. All major conferences do this for the same reasons that LSU does. Because it is vital to have enough home games to pay for the program and it is vital to have enough wins to be a contender, especially when you play in the SEC with 3 or 4 perennial top-10 teams. Any major school that decides to schedule only major conference teams will go the way of Notre Dame and fall behind the curve.
I don't disagree in that we need to schedule enough games to have home games to pay for the program, but there are enough D-1 schools out there that don't threaten our ability to have the same success as we do against D-II schools. If we scheduled the WAC, MWC, etc we would still get the wins, but they would be D-I schools.
