Take a surface-level look at LSU, and you won’t see the trappings of a national title contender. The Tigers have already picked up two losses, and they haven’t even hit the toughest part of their schedule yet.
So, as of Monday, coach Lane Kiffin hasn’t had to poke around the LSU locker room for “rat poison” — the term Nick Saban once coined to describe the kind of outside adulation that can seep into a program, fool an unsuspecting team and warp its perception of how good it really is.
“There’s no rat poison in the polls,” Kiffin said.
He’s right. The poll voters and College Football Playoff committee members consider LSU, at best, to be a fringe playoff team. The Tigers are entering their Week 10 showdown with Alabama in Tiger Stadium (2:30 p.m., ABC) slotted at 15th in the AP Top 25 poll and 14th in the CFP rankings.
Both voting groups seem to favor other two-loss Southeastern Conference teams over LSU.
Alabama, Texas and Ole Miss are ahead of the Tigers in both the AP poll and the CFP rankings, while Tennessee is ranked one spot behind them in the AP poll and one spot ahead of them in the CFP rankings.
The subtext is simple: Voters want to see LSU beat a playoff-caliber team before it deems it a playoff-caliber team. As of Week 10, the Tigers’ most impressive win is arguably their Week 8 road victory over unranked Auburn — a 4-4 team that scored a huge upset win over Georgia in Week 7 but followed it up with back-to-back blowout losses.
The humans are waiting to see what LSU does against Alabama, Texas and Tennessee. No “rat poison” there.
But if you sniff around a little more, you may find some in the numbers, which look like they already have an idea of how Kiffin’s program will fare in those games.
Just consider a few key metrics.
The Tigers rank fourth among FBS teams in ESPN’s SP+ (a predictive efficiency metric) and fifth in its Football Power Index.
They rank fifth nationally in Expected Points Added per play and first in adjusted EPA/play.
In October, according to TruMedia, they were also one of three teams with an offensive success rate of at least 50% and a defensive success rate of at least 60%.
Add it all up, and it’s clear that LSU has one of the best analytical profiles in the country entering the last month of the regular season.
So, what does it all mean?
“The bottom line is they’re not bad at anything,” said ESPN’s Bill Connelly, the creator of SP+. “There’s not just a huge weakness anywhere in their statistical profile, other than big plays could be a little bigger, but that’s about as close as it gets.
“Otherwise they’ve been really, really solid since the turnovers kind of dried up after those first couple of weeks.”
Take Kentucky, for example. Connelly calls coach Will Stein’s upstart program the “reverse of LSU.”
The No. 6 Wildcats (7-1) are tied for first place in the SEC and positioned to earn a CFP berth, but they’re ranked only 34th in SP+ in large part because they picked up two of their wins (over South Carolina in Week 5 and over LSU in Week 6) by converting two-point conversions in overtime.
Those plays, while analytically sound and carefully executed, are doing quite a bit of heavy lifting on Kentucky’s overall resume. Winning on such a razor’s edge is not exactly sustainable, and if either play hadn’t worked, then the chances are that we’d view the Wildcats’ season through a much different lens.
LSU, on the other hand, has found itself on the wrong end of a few fluky plays, the Kentucky two-point conversion being one of them. The rest of its resume has sheer predictable, repeatable dominance all over it, albeit against no team ranked higher than 37th in SP+.
The Tigers’ beatdowns of Clemson, Texas A&M, Mississippi State and Auburn are reflected in the other two metrics highlighted above: EPA and success rate.
EPA is a measure of how much a team’s likelihood of scoring changes after one specific play, with down and distance factored in. Success rate is a percentage of plays that produce a positive EPA.
The metrics tend to reward teams more for lopsided wins than for close ones, which is why they reflect so well on LSU.
In their four power-conference wins, the Tigers have won by an average margin of 30.5 points and outgained their opponents by an average of 295 yards.
Connelly’s model says that a team such as LSU is expected to win a game 65% of the time when it shakes out like the one against Kentucky did in Week 6. If those two teams met again, the Tigers “would almost certainly” be favored, Connelly said.
So LSU might just be better than most people think.
Just don’t tell Kiffin, the first-year coach who’s still trying to sweep away any rat poison he finds.
“You’re one week away,” Kiffin said, “from everybody saying, ‘Oh, we’re great, man, LSU is back,’ if we win this week, and if we lose, it’ll be like, ‘OK, get rid of the coach.’
“It’s gonna move so much between now and the end of the year, and you control a lot of it, so if you play really well and win, you won’t have anything to worry about.”
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