As it turns out, the LSU Tigers may not win a National Championship after all. As it also turns out, Colin Cowherd’s track record of correctly predicting or judging a sports result isn’t excellent. Perhaps Brian Kelly should’ve checked who had his team reaching the National Championship game before bluntly declaring, “We’re going to beat the heck out of Florida State.”
While Sunday night’s drubbing doesn’t preclude the Tigers from running the table and winning the SEC, their season is off to a rather bleak start. Florida State looked like a team that was more worthy of being a title contender in the 45-24 blowout. But that wasn’t exactly what Cowhered was preaching last month.
“I have Michigan facing LSU in the championship,” Cowherd told Greg McElroy in an appearance on Always College Football, via On3. “I don’t think LSU is the best SEC team, I don’t think they’re the deepest. But I love the coach, I love the quarterback, and I looked at their schedule and I think LSU? It’s going to be a lot of people knocking each other off. I like LSU a lot.”
“I think it would be a real story because Brian Kelly was at Notre Dame and Notre Dame has resonance (in Los Angeles). And I think if they beat a Michigan and it was a competitive game? It’d be a win for college football. The SEC winning is not bad. The SEC beating Michigan State in the playoff by 40 is bad. So if it’s LSU 35-33? I’ve got no problem with that.”
Maybe Cowherd liked LSU a little too much.
The quarterback he touted, Jayden Daniels, took an absolute beating. Daniels went 22-of-37 for 347 yards with a touchdown and an interception, while adding 64 yards on the ground on 15 carries. While his performance wasn’t bad per se, it didn’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence, especially when he was supposed to take another step forward this season.
As for the head coach, well, Stewart Mandel of The Athletic quoted Kelly saying, “We certainly are not the football team I thought we were. We need to do a much better job developing our football team. We clearly were short in a lot of areas and that falls on me… For some reason we thought we were somebody else than we were, the two-time national champion Georgia Bulldogs or something. I don’t know what we thought, but we were mistaken.”
Brian Kelly: “We certainly are not the football team I thought we were. We need to do a much better job developing our football team. We clearly were short in a lot of areas and that falls on me.”
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) September 4, 2023
More Brian Kelly: “For some reason we thought we were somebody else than we were, the two time national champion Georgia Bulldogs or something. I don't know what we thought, but we were mistaken.”
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) September 4, 2023
Maybe Cowhered was mistaken too. But as we know, he won’t hesitate to flip-flop and has previously preached the value of changing one’s opinion. So if Cowherd is no longer touting LSU as his national championship pick, at least we now know why.
[On3]
