No team in all of college football has been through the battles that undefeated LSU has faced on its way to a 13-0 record and its first SEC championship since 2011. Taking down the likes of Georgia, Alabama, Auburn and Florida required the Tigers to win in different ways, yet no matter the circumstances of the contest, there was a championship form to the way LSU took care of its business.
The results of the impressive 13-game run produced a good amount of hardware for LSU in award season -- from Joe Burrow's record-breaking margin in a Heisman Trophy win to the entire offensive line receiving the Joe Moore Award and Ed Orgeron getting the nod as the national coach of the year. But those accolades fade into the rearview now as they will be paired with some amount of disappointment if LSU can't follow this historic season with a national championship.
With that in mind, here's three reasons that LSU will win the College Football Playoff.
1. The smart aggressiveness of Joe Burrow: Every playoff participant in 2019 is ranked in the top six nationally in scoring offense so this might not seem like a big point of separation, but none of the other quarterbacks have had the kind of year that we saw in 2019 from Burrow. What separated Burrow from the other quarterbacks this year wasn't just the prolific output, but how integral he was to the success of the offense while rarely being the source of LSU beating itself.
Burrow's 77.9 completion percentage was historic, and while LSU's elite group of receivers deserves plenty of credit for that stat, so does Burrow's decision-making. It's as much about the chances that Burrow doesn't take as the ones he does, and this second full season as a starter has shown the senior quarterback elevate his game in terms of moving around in the pocket to extend plays and let them develop. No one is cool under pressure quite like Burrow, and it didn't matter whether it was a low-scoring grinder against Auburn or a high-scoring, pressure-packed shootout in Tuscaloosa against Alabama: Burrow was a fiery yet steady presence that kept the Tigers' offense aggressive. No one can afford to milk clock or play keep away when all four teams have the potential to pile up points in a hurry, so Burrow's smart aggressiveness is going to be a game-changer.
2. Orgeron's feel for what his team, and staff, need to succeed: Orgeron has spent so much time in and around college football that it's easy for fans to blend the years together to create an amalgamation of expectations for his personality and performance. But if you isolate the results since he took over at LSU and consider the comments from his staff and Coach O himself, you realize that even famously inflexible college football coaches can make some changes to their approach.
The Athletic's Bruce Feldman spent a week with LSU heading into the SEC Championship Game against Georgia, and one thing that stood out was how loose he has been before the biggest games of the season. That confidence might be because he's known all year that he has the best team in the country, but it also might be a way of letting that confidence become contagious throughout the locker room. Orgeron has a setup that allows his assistants to do their job without too much meddling or over-booking their schedule with full-staff meetings, and that's created a healthy and competitive culture throughout the program.
The results of his approach speak for themselves: Orgeron is 38-9 overall and of his 38 wins, 16 of them have come against ranked opponents, including a 10-3 mark against top-10 teams. LSU has become one of the best programs in the country when performing on the game's biggest stages, and that starts with Coach O.
3. If you buy into the whole "team of destiny" thing, LSU has all the boxes checked: Should LSU beat Oklahoma in Atlanta, where it just won its first SEC championship since 2011, it will advance to the College Football Playoff National Championship Game in New Orleans, which ... yeah. High school football in the state of Louisiana is LSU-crazy, with dozens of teams wearing purple-and-gold and/or claiming "Tigers" as their mascot. If you make New Orleans choose between the Saints and LSU, the good people of one of the greatest cities in America might choose their state's college team over the Super Bowl-winning franchise in town. I can take all the "it just means more" jokes and still stay with confidence: things are just different when it comes to LSU and the state of Louisiana.
Then there's the next part of this, as LSU would be returning to the national championship game for the first time since it was stuffed out by Alabama, in New Orleans. That "Game of the Century" rematch haunted LSU until Orgeron, Burrow and the 2019 Tigers snapped the losing streak to the Tide that started in that game. If LSU can get past Oklahoma, there will be a chance to complete the reversal of all that frustration: beat Alabama, win the SEC and claim a national championship in a city that will be overrun with purple-and-gold.
