Post-Game Thoughts from SBN’s And the Valley Shook

SBN’s LSU blog, And the Valley Shook, weighs in with a few initial thoughts in the aftermath of tonight’s loss:

• Jordan Jefferson played a poor game, and once again went into the tank in the 3rd quarter. He started holding the ball forever and inviting sacks, getting 3 of them in the 3rd quarter alone, a quarter in which we ran 8 plays. He’ll finish 11 for 17 on the night, but very few of his passes went down the field, and he took sacks.
• Never has LSU gotten more infuriating penalties. We were called for a neutral zone infraction 5 times. We had, I think, 3 false starts, including two on consecutive play attempts. We had a personal foul facemask call on a play where we would have gotten off the field if not for the call (and the call was somewhat questionable as to whether it should have been a personal foul or one of the old-fashioned incidental facemasks that are now supposed to be waived off).
• The defense is going to get a lot of credit for holding Florida to a small number of points, but they also gave up yardage every time Florida touched the ball. We relied on a missed field goal and a failed 4th down try to keep the score as low as it was.
• I do not understand why Russell Shepard got not playing time in this game. I know they’ll say, “We were having a hard time getting into a rhythm and we didn’t want to bring in a new guy,” but the fact is that the offense was stagnating, and we needed to do something to shake things up.