Sam Leavitt comes from West Linn, Oregon. That’s just outside Portland and well outside of the sphere of passion, pride and downright bitterness that is the LSU-Alabama rivalry.
Still, that football-mad lad growing up 2,000 miles away from Baton Rouge and Tuscaloosa did not need a tutorial on how special a game between the Tigers and Crimson Tide has been through the years.
“If someone told me Bama was playing LSU on Saturday, I was going to be watching,” Leavitt said. “Now being part of it, it’s a surreal and special experience.”
Surreal as it may sound, this may be the transfer quarterback’s only chance to be part of this remarkable series.
LSU and Alabama have played each other every year since 1964, but their annual rivalry will end after Saturday’s game in Tiger Stadium (2:30 p.m., ABC). That’s because under the new nine-game Southeastern Conference scheduling format, these schools aren’t on each other’s list of permanent opponents. LSU has Ole Miss, Texas A&M and Arkansas; Alabama has Auburn, Tennessee and Mississippi State.
It’s hardly farewell forever. LSU will play Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 2028. Still, something is definitely being lost here — like a classic old building unable to escape the wrecking ball.
That loss isn’t lost on LSU coach Lane Kiffin.
“I think that’s just sad,” Kiffin said Monday. “I understand, so I’m not being critical. All of them (changes to college athletics) come down to money, whether that’s realignment or the rivalries. I think it’s all sad in general, in the big picture of things. There’s really good things that have changed in college football over the years. But there’s also a lot that myself and a lot of people wish were the way that they were — rivalries and conferences.
“Unfortunately, that’s where we are. Doesn’t seem like much will be protected when it comes to TV contracts and money and other people’s ideas.”
Like Leavitt, this is Kiffin’s first chance to experience this rivalry from an LSU perspective. He’s seen it from the Alabama sideline, when he was calling plays as Nick Saban’s offensive coordinator from 2014-16.
Kiffin’s Alabama years were all Crimson Tide victories, two of them close ones in Tiger Stadium: 20-13 in overtime in 2014, 10-0 in 2016. They made an impression on Kiffin, who witnessed Saban’s devoutly Catholic wife Terry sprinkle holy water on the Tiger Stadium turf during pregame warmups.
“I’m walking on the sideline before the LSU game,” Kiffin said in July at SEC media days, “and she’s got this stuff and putting it on the ground. I’m like, ‘What are you doing?’ She’s like, ‘There’s real voodoo here in the stadium. There’s real voodoo, and they don’t like Nick here. So, I’ve got to spread this stuff out to make sure we’re OK.’ ”
Saban got enormous boos and insults hurled at him whenever his Alabama teams came to call, but they were 6-2 in Tiger Stadium. Perhaps Terry Saban and her holy water deserve an assist.
During those trips to Tiger Stadium, a seed was planted in Kiffin’s mind.
“Being there five times, but always on the other sideline, I had always pictured, ‘What would that have been like (coaching LSU)?’ ” Kiffin said. “You could feel the weight coming down on you on the opposing sideline.”
Former LSU coach Ed Orgeron, now on Kiffin’s staff as a special assistant, wanted to hire Kiffin as his offensive coordinator. Rumor was that Saban got his and Kiffin’s agent, Jimmy Sexton, to find him a head coaching job, which he did at Florida Atlantic.
But the siren song of coaching at LSU, in that stadium, in this rivalry, never left Kiffin.
“Just wait, man,” Orgeron told his friend Kiffin, “it lifts you up.”
‘A legendary game’
Both teams could use a lift Saturday.
Part of the reason the SEC went to a nine-game conference schedule was in anticipation of the College Football Playoff expanding to 24 teams. It hasn’t yet — there is a “handshake agreement” between the CFP powers and ESPN to do so for 2027 — but this game is crucial for the 12-team playoff this season.
A loss Saturday doesn’t eliminate neither LSU (6-2, 3-2 SEC) nor Alabama (6-2, 4-2). The Tigers come in No. 14 in the initial CFP rankings, while Alabama puzzlingly is way up at No. 5, eight spots ahead of the two-loss Tennessee team that beat the Tide 26-10 in October.
This could be the year a team with three regular-season losses with a good enough resume gets into the CFP, but no one wants to count on that. Especially not the Tigers, who the following Saturday host Texas in their Tiger Stadium finale before going on the road to play Tennessee.
This clearly meets the definition of a big game. That’s nothing new in this rivalry. Saturday’s game marks the 33rd time, going back to 1964, when the Tigers and Tide are both ranked.
“Being a kid growing up (here), Alabama-LSU was such a legendary game,” former Zachary tight end Trey’Dez Green said. “This was the game all the fans were waiting on.”
LSU often has had to wait years for a win over Alabama. Since 1964, the Tigers have prevailed only 19 times. There was an 11-game losing streak to the Tide from 1971-81, and an eight-game losing streak from the 2012 BCS national championship game through 2018.
But when LSU won, it typically meant the Tigers accomplished something special that year. Going way back to 1958, every time LSU has won the national championship and/or the SEC title, a win over Alabama has been a stepping stone to capturing that year’s trophy. That includes a victory in the 2011 “Game of the Century” when No. 1 LSU outlasted No. 2 Alabama 9-6 in overtime in Tuscaloosa in the hardest-hitting college football game I’ve ever witnessed. That’s not surprising, since 45 future NFL draft picks squared off that night.
LSU won the SEC. Alabama exacted revenge in that season’s BCS national championship game, 21-0 in the Superdome. The ghost of that LSU team is still trying to cross the 50 against the impregnable Crimson Tide.
In 2019, No. 2 LSU held off No. 3 Alabama 46-41 in an offensive thriller in Tuscaloosa, with Joe Burrow and the Tigers outlasting Tua Tagovalioa and the Tide. Nothing stopped LSU’s drive to the national championship that season, though beating Alabama for the first time since 2011 might have been even sweeter than beating Clemson in the CFP final in the Superdome.
“They beat us for eight years,” Coach O said. “We had enough.”
A matter of pride
Sometimes, LSU’s wins against Alabama were for pride — like in 1982, when the Tigers snapped an 11-game losing streak to Alabama with an emphatic 20-10 victory in Tuscaloosa. The defeat helped send Paul “Bear” Bryant into retirement. He seemingly couldn’t live without football, dying three months after the loss to LSU.
In 1993, 3-5 LSU was a huge 25-point underdog in Tuscaloosa to an Alabama team riding a 31-game unbeaten streak. “Tide could lose, pigs might fly” read a headline in the Mobile Press-Register. In what became known as the “Pigs will fly” game, LSU pulled off a stunning 17-13 victory in Tuscaloosa that ranks as the biggest upset in the history of the rivalry.
The Tigers’ last win against Alabama came in 2022, a 32-31 overtime thriller that in this writer’s experience ranks as the most exciting game in Tiger Stadium history. LSU scored and went for two in overtime, with Jayden Daniels throwing for two points to Mason Taylor to clinch what was Kelly’s biggest win at LSU.
Tiger fans stormed the field afterward. LSU linebacker TJ Dottery, who transferred with Kiffin from Ole Miss, is hoping to experience something dramatic like that.
“I’m very excited to be part of it,” the Montgomery, Alabama, native said. “I dreamed of it as a kid being from Alabama.”
This isn’t the game of the century this time. But on a blockbuster college football Saturday with six ranked matchups scattered across the country, it’s still a compelling one. That’s why ESPN’s top college football broadcasting duo of Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit will call the game. The game consistently has drawn huge ratings for ESPN and CBS over the years.
Whose dreams will win out Saturday? Will it open the door for one of these teams to make the CFP or be the loss that slams it shut?
Whatever happens, the memory of it will have to sustain Tigers and Tide fans for a couple of years until they square off once again.
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