'Imagine if we had pro players': LSU blows out Clemson 51-10 as Lane Kiffin trolls all of college football

BATON ROUGE, La. — Mother Nature wanted Lane Kiffin and LSU to sit for a little bit longer and think about what they've done. Kiffin and LSU responded by hanging a 51-10 score on Clemson. Litigation isn't all they're good at, as it turns out.

Yes, it's early September. Yes, LSU beat the orange off an overmatched Clemson squad that's unranked and yet still overrated. But after a Saturday night in Death Valley where LSU ran over Clemson on both sides of the ball, it's not too soon to declare that Kiffin's squad might just be for real, and a real problem for the rest of the SEC.

"Imagine if we had pro players," Kiffin told ESPN's Holly Rowe as he left the field at halftime, and how you view that statement — proudly defiant or infuriatingly smug — probably depends on whether you live in the state of Louisiana. Kiffin delivered the line after LSU put the finishing touches on a half in which they'd outscored Clemson by 28 points, rushing for 213 yards and 21 first downs while holding Clemson to a net minus-4 yards and a single first down.

Matters didn't get any better for Clemson in the second half even after a desperation quarterback change. LSU, meanwhile, grew more confident in real time. The patchwork collection of transfers and new staff answered the most serious question facing LSU by working as an actual team, leaving the 10 ½-point spread far behind.

"With all the noise throughout the offseason, we really have done an incredible job of just blocking it out. It's really never even been a thought process in the building," LSU quarterback Sam Leavitt said afterward. "It's not even like we've had to hush people. We come to work and we put our heads down and we grind. That's all we do, we just keep grinding."

Kiffin always manages to whip everything around him into a frenzy, and late on Saturday afternoon, that included the skies as well as the rest of college football. For a few minutes there around 6 p.m., it sure looked like the Almighty had a problem with the way that Louisiana State University has been handling business lately.

Months after Kiffin jumped from Ole Miss to LSU in the midst of the Rebels' playoff charge, weeks after Kiffin and LSU first began entertaining the idea of bringing back players who had already left college for the NFL , days after LSU and the the SEC engaged in a game of judicial chicken , hours after Kiffin and the Tigers stood down — for the moment — and didn't roster former NFL players, and just before Tiger Stadium's 90-minutes-to-kickoff clock was set to begin counting down … lightning tore through the sky and the heavens opened up with build-an-ark force.

The Lane Kiffin Era thus began about two hours late, and faceplanted right out of the gate. On the second play of LSU's first possession, Leavitt threw behind receiver Malik Elzy, who tipped the ball into the hands of a waiting Clemson defender. And since Kiffin was unable to find a judge willing to overturn the interception on such short notice, Clemson quickly flipped the turnover into a three-point lead.

The few fans among the 102,321 in Tiger Stadium wearing orange celebrated for what, as it turned out, would be the only time of the night. LSU evened the score on the next possession, and then methodically tore apart Dabo Swinney's apparently unprepared team.

LSU, which ranked among the worst rushing teams in college football over the last two seasons, ran up nearly 300 yards on the ground, with Leavitt and running back Dilin Jones each surpassing 100 yards and scoring two touchdowns.

Leavitt, who only appeared in seven games last season for Arizona State due to injury, shook off his early interception to craft a confident game. He scored his two touchdowns on broken-field scrambles, the kind of throw-your-body-at-the-end-zone plays that rally both a team and a fan base. He finally left the game late in the third with the score 44-3 and the final result very much assured.

"First game jitters, to be honest," Leavitt said after the game, assessing his performance. "The depth perception is a little bit different when there's fans. We've been in the stadium before, but it definitely felt a little different with fans, so just getting used to that. Once we got settled in, we started playing a little better."

Clemson, on the other hand, now finds itself in as grim a situation as it's ever been during Swinney's tenure. Quarterback Chris Vizzina was ineffective, throwing for just 52 yards on 8 of 14 completions, including a pick-6, before getting yanked. His replacement, Tait Reynolds, wasn't any better. Clemson now faces hard questions, and the strength of Swinney's mid-2010s résumé withered long ago.

Clemson has only beaten LSU once in five meetings — at the 2012 Peach Bowl — a run that includes LSU's triumphant 2019-season national championship. This marked the first time Clemson had ever visited the bayou Death Valley, and considering how Saturday turned out, it'll likely be a long time before they come back.

LSU, meanwhile, now has the earned confidence to go with its inherent arrogance. The purple Tigers will get a much tougher test, physically and psychologically, two weeks from now in Oxford against Ole Miss. But so far, everything's looking just fine in Baton Rouge, whether pro players are on the roster or not.

"The whole day was really neat, how electric the campus was, what people said. That's what LSU's supposed to be," Kiffin said. "That's the LSU swagger. That's the energy. That's how the stadium is supposed to be. Hard to come in and play, hard to play on offenses, especially quarterbacks."

Kiffin declined to go into more detail about roster decisions and the pro-player controversy that's dominated discussion about the LSU program up until Saturday evening. "We've been criticized heavily for the last two weeks, and I get that, I understand," he told the assembled media. "But my job is not to please you and worry about what you're gonna write. My job is, what I believe is right, and I believe we were fighting for what was right for those kids … This night was awesome for our fans, and [the former pro players] shouldn't be the storyline."

Nearly an hour after the game ended, Kiffin, a couple security officers, and a few confidants took a walk across the quiet Tiger Stadium field. Kiffin posed for a picture in front of the final score, then wandered for a few yards alone. As he walked off the field, he exhaled, apparently in relief. One job done, many more yet to go.