CFB Crystal Ball: UCLA @ LSU - Week 4
DeShaun Foster is tired of the disrespect. Petitti and Sankey stage a B1G-SEC summit to carve up the rest of the CFB landscape. LSU drinkers get to DEFCON 2 blood-alcohol levels. Nussmeier picks up where he left off. Mick reminds everyone who's boss.
This is the third installment of Robn's CFB Crystal Ball Preview Series, which predicts what will transpire during some of the 2024 season's most compelling matchups. Everything in this prediction will assuredly come true. Just wait. We are really good at this.
Date: September 21, 2024
What We Imagine The Broadcast To Be: 7:30pm ET on ABC
Location: Tiger Stadium - Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Actual Lookahead Line as of July 1: No line (Robn estimated line: LSU -16.5)
We open on the UCLA team plane en route to Baton Rouge. The mood is milquetoast, the tone subdued. It has the same aura of marching your child into time out - the punishment has really just begun. No Bruin player would ever admit it, but some of them believe their defeat is imminent.
(But even when a game is basically already over once it starts, the Robn CFB Crystal Ball tells you what happens before it starts. Why else are you paying $60 for this?)
New UCLA head coach DeShaun Foster is tired of the disrespect.
He sitting in "The Throne," the specific seat on the plane formerly reserved for Chip Kelly when he used to fly around during the six years that he didn't want to be the Bruins coach.
Foster is still thinking about his run-in on the tarmac at Burbank airport with Bruins hoops coach Mick Cronin before they took off. Mick had just landed, returning on the same team plane from a recruiting visit. As he deplaned from his jet, as he called it, the first words out of his mouth reminded Foster that the basketball team's recent NIL haul is what is paying for the jet's upkeep. "Least you could do is write me a fuc**** thank you note for sending your whole team to Louisiana. It's pathetic," Mick said, betraying no smile or comedic undertones, doing his typical job of misquantifying the percentage of douche he spawns into the world.
Foster doesn't take a lot of flack – he played in the NFL and his been a position coach at UCLA football program for years. But the remarks caught him very off guard, and served as a broader metaphor for his entire tenure: it's uneasy.
The Commissioner
And then there was the completely unfair raiding of his slush fund. UCLA's athletic director is named Martin Jarmond. He sounds like a 1990's CNN correspondent, or someone who wishes they wrote for Wine Spectator. Jarmond pledged to Foster that the money saved by hiring Foster (burn) would be put toward his own NIL expenses (yay?).
But just yesterday, right after pledging that cash to a five-star defensive lineman in Thousand Oaks, Foster found out the money was going to the down payment on a new lite-rail system to shuttle tan co-eds from Westwood to Pasadena on game days. It will have no logical function outside of six Saturdays per year and will provide sinecures to 17 government contractors.
The early-season wins over Hawaii and Indiana haven't helped much, either. The consensus remains that the Bruins athletic department set Foster and the program up to fail because of how it handled Kelly's departure and the subsequent coaching search that wasn't finalized until February (i.e. all the good candidates are unavailable, so let's promote from within).
It's especially bad considering the team has the second-toughest schedule in the country punctuated by almost an entirely new slate of conference foes. Foster did his best to catch up in the transfer portal, working even into late June to get new players. Still, it's all affecting him, mentally.
Now, yes: UCLA has only ever played LSU once before – three years ago – and they won. They beat LSU. Dorian Thompson-Robinson led them to a 38-27 victory over Max Johnson and Kayshon Boutte.
But that was then. And this now. UCLA now has to play Big Ten meat football with mostly vegan stock, Big Ten money football with mostly the allure of past prestige (in a different sport).
Something sharp down in the cushion of The Throne is gouging Foster in the ass. He shifts in his seat and pulls out what is either a severely chewed off pen from Chip's coaching days or one of Mick's shivs. Another cruel metaphor for the early days of the Foster regime, this time tactile. And dangerous.
Meeting at midfield before kickoff, LSU head coach Brian Kelly finally appears to be the first person to treat Foster as a peer. He shakes Foster's hand and then starts doing weird things with his vowels.
"It's just so radical for you to be elevated to this position in our great game. So stoked for you, man. I loved watching you in the NFL. Just killer, man. Killer."
"Are ... are you talking in a California accent to try to endear yourself to me?"
"Listen." Kelly's back in his normal tangy anglo, now. "I think it's terrible what Chip did to you when you were with the Eagles. He basically ran you off the team. That wasn't right. And you still came back and coached with him. That's respect."
"That was DeSean Jackson. I'm DeShaun Foster."
Kelly catches the eye of an important booster and immediately buzzes off.
The Commissioner
Once the game starts, LSU tries to do Jayden Daniels-y things sans Jayden Daniels. It mostly works, still, because UCLA's defense lost some key studs from last year and the current corps hasn't seen anything in their short lives as potent as the arm of Garrett Nussmeier, he of the 400 passing yards in his effective debut last year against Wisconsin. It is 17-0 LSU at the end of the first.
UCLA responds with uptempo offense, almost like the faster it plays the sooner this can all end. New Bruins Offensive Coordinator Eric Bienemy - who I thought as a kid watching him in a Chargers uniform on Sundays was named Eric The Enemy, like he was some Norse God - has Ethan Garbers target Michael Carmody.
He gets some traction, including a 16-yard TD pass aided by UCLA picking off Nussmeier in LSU territory, before Bradyn Swinson and Da'Shawn Womack make themselves routinely known off the edge. Garbers briefly develops atrial fibrillation from the terror and yearns for the sweet evening air of Westwood, not this sticky Baton Rouge soup.
LSU leads 24-10 at the half.
The players are cooling down in the locker rooms, but business is just heating up. High above the stadium in a row of secret suites reserved exclusively for Pete Maravich's grandchildren, the Honey Badger, and Ed Orgeron's ex-wife, college football's Arch-Villain Summit is long underway.
Tony Petitti and Greg Sankey, the commissioners of the Big Ten and SEC respectively, had initially planned to meet and craft their plan for world domination at the USC-LSU game in Week 1 at Allegiant Stadium. But it seemed a little...forced. There'd be too many people there. Sankey would be too strained and offended from having to acknowledge the existence of the pacific time zone with his physical presence, while Petitti, a known degenerate at the tables, has made it a point in recent years to avoid Vegas.
On his last Sin City trip he went on a nine-hour bender that ended with him standing atop a Roulette table at The Flamingo, deliriously screaming about colonizing the entire Pac-12, not just the airport schools he was able to obtain, and continuously going double-or-nothing on 12, until double-or-nothing included his lake home, the University of Illinois' Belted Kingfisher mascot, his blackmail tapes on Juwan Howard, and the CBS-portion of his new media rights deal. When he came to the next morning, his lawyers had Ohtani'd the whole thing, but he was scared straight. Plus, you know what they always say: You can't create a SuperConference in 110-degree heat.
In the suite, Sankey sips his Willet neat, and he waits. He's sitting in a baby-soft leather-backed chair donated by Brad Nessler (it's as smooth as my voice, he told the school). Greg Sankey doesn't make first moves. He lets the others squirm and spit out something stupid. Greg Sankey controls the pieces and the playing board, see, like your older brother who can beat you up and has dirt on you, or like Noriega before the Feds got him.
He is a lifelong southern athletic director and conference commissioner. Petitti, meanwhile, is a Harvard law grad, worked at a white-shoe firm, was the former COO of MLB and the head of MLB Network, oversaw programming for ABC Sports, and none of it matters, because he is in Greg Sankey's kitchen and when you're in Greg Sankey's kitchen he eats you up. There is no negotiation. The negotiation is him explaining how he's already out-leveraged you.
So, Petitti, sitting on a divan he found in a closet marked "Kelly Orgeron - do not touch!" goes first.
"I'll give yo- I mean, how about you take the-
"You'll give me? Let's get one thing straight Mr. Madison Avenue, you don't give me anything. We are assigning the assets of the college football landscape to our two conferences in a way where I will take 60% and you will take 40% so that when this all crumbles away and the 40 richest programs play in one giant conference and everyone else is cheesed, it will at least appear as if you did a respectable job in being one of the last two conferences to stand. Albeit the smaller of the two."
"Stop making everything a dick-measuring contest, Greg."
"All of life's a dick-measuring contest, Tony."
"I was going to say that you should take the ACC. It makes geographical sense. It--
"When did gee-oggg-graphy have anything to do with any of this? Last I checked, Stanford's in the ACC. Cal is in the ACC. So is Boston College. So is Louisville."
"Just, do you want the ACC or not?"
He's making the New York lawyer cower, on a divan no less.
The Commissioner
"Tony, Tony, Tony..." – more Willet – "what would I want with the ACC? We're already taking Florida State and Clemson in three years. I don't need Duke or UNC basketball. I don't know what Miami does these days, but they're all crazier than a cat on a hot tin roof trying to stir up shit. The rest are all nerds!"
"What do you propose?"
"I'm proposing that you wait by the phone for when I'm done raiding the Big 12, and when I am, you can gobble up the rest."
"What is this, Greg? I thought you wanted a free exchange of ideas. An open dialogue. You spout those lines all the time. You're just dictating to me..."
"You know Tony, I was bummed out when you cancelled on our scheduled meeting in Las Vegas last month. I heard about your little meltdown there, at the casino. I even talked to some people who saw it. Talked to some people who have the whole episode on film. And I invested a small sum in the ownership of that film."
"...."
"Something wrong, Tony? You look more nervous than a small nun at a penguin shoot."
"Can... can I have the Summit League, at least?"
"We'll think about it, Tony. We'll think about it."
Back down below, the second half is more or less a replay of the first, but far fewer people get to see it.
Ironically, the game's individual sponsor (yes, LSU sells those) is Cox Cable, who has made good on its promise to black-out the game to its 6.2 million subscribers if ESPN didn't settle their most recent contract dispute by halftime. There is a bizarre cruelty in a threat to black something out mid-game, but it doesn't play at all on the heartstrings of Jimmy Pitaro. "Let them goooo darrrkkkkk!!!" Pitaro growls at no one as he pages through accounts receivable from ESPN+ and the growing universe of random streaming services.
Those with other cable providers witness UCLA exploiting holes in the somewhat improved LSU defensive, but their successes are few and far between, and not numerous enough to keep pace with LSU's relentless scoring effort. As the game trudges through the fourth quarter with a Tiger victory securely in hand, LSU fans' progressive drunkenness level increases from DEFCON 3 to DEFCON 2. If these BACs were assumed by other fanbases it would leave a majority of participants dead.
It turns downright ugly when, running out the clock, a few LSU offensive linemen start berating UCLA DBs Devin Kirkwood and Jaylin Davies about their joint NIL deal with Nipsey Hussle's new fashion line, Just The Nip. When one of the linemen observes that Nipsey obviously didn't Hussle fast enough because he was unable to avoid being shot, they learn via a left jab and a right hook from Kirkwood himself that Hussle was Kirkwood's cousin.
A brief brawl ensues before LSU coach Kelly, who hasn't had much to get truly furious at in this game, sees an opportunity to go beet red and just get angry by association with others' angriness about a death and a culture he could never understand.
Meanwhile, the LSU fans who are DEFCONNING are hurling all sorts of obscenities at Foster. Foster's heard smack talking from other fanbases before, but this seems... personal. And specific.
Then it clicks for Foster, who looks to the heavens for relief.
"That was DeShaun WATSON what is wrong with you people!?"
He's so tired of the disrespect.
- Final Score: LSU 45, UCLA 24
- 2024 Airmiles Tally: Mick Cronin - 5,284, DeShaun Foster - 4,586
