LSU safety Ty Benefield pursues Mississippi State running back Xavier Gayten on a goal line play in the second quarter on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026 Tiger Stadium.
When it was played in August as the golf season’s last major, the PGA Championship was billed as “Glory’s Last Shot.”
The PGA moved up to May seven years ago. So, on this second Saturday in November, the LSU Tigers are free to appropriate that catchphrase for their regular-season home finale against Texas.
Back in May of this year, there was speculation that the Tigers could be a College Football Playoff team.
After its season-opening 51-10 rout of Clemson (which has gone 6-2 since), LSU looked like a national championship contender.
Now, in the second week of November, there is doubt, mixed with anxiety and a hot sauce dash of fear regarding the Tigers’ endangered playoff hopes.
There are no more mulligans, second chances, or do overs for LSU (6-3, 3-3 Southeastern Conference). The Tigers either win out against Texas (6:30 p.m., ABC) next week at Tennessee and Nov. 28 at Arkansas or are down for the count.
Clearly, this is glory’s last shot for the Tigers.
LSU may be out of the playoffs anyway. In the first two years of the 12-team CFP, no team with three regular-season losses has gotten the nod from the selection committee (10-3 Alabama got in last year after losing the SEC Championship Game to Georgia). Texas had that bitter experience last year, left out with a 9-3 record that included a one-score defeat at Ohio State.
But the analytics still say the Tigers have more than a lightning bolt’s chance of making it. ESPN’s playoff predictor web page says if LSU wins out it has a 73% chance of still a bid. Given enough chaos and carnage over the next four weeks, LSU might even get to host a first-round playoff game. That means Saturday’s game could possibly not be the last in Tiger Stadium for 2026.
Lose one more, though, and the Tigers are toast. A loss to any of LSU’s remaining teams swings the predictability needle wildly the other way to about 1%. That’s as near to nothing as to make no odds.
First-year coach Lane Kiffin, who has faced and deserved enormous expectations since leaving a playoff precipice Ole Miss team for LSU a year ago, has tried to keep his Tigers focused exclusively on the process, not the playoffs.
“I don’t ever talk about playoffs because that’s just outcome,” Kiffin said earlier this season.
But the players know. Safety Ty Benefield – who somewhat ironically left a likely CFP playoff participant at Boise State to transfer to LSU – said a “backs to the wall” realization is part of the Tigers’ mental mix for this all-important game.
“We have to understand the situation we’re in,” Benefield said, “but we can’t focus on it.”
There’s a ton of history and emotion wrapped into this game beyond LSU’s CFP hopes.
Unless you’re at least in your late 70s, you’ve never seen the Longhorns stampede into Tiger Stadium. This is Texas’ first visit here since 1953 and just the 19th meeting between the programs overall. Texas was supposed to return LSU’s 2019 trip to Austin (a thrilling 45-38 Tigers victory) in 2020, but SEC teams ended up playing a 10-game all-conference schedule (Texas didn’t join until 2024) and the game was canceled.
This is also a homecoming of sorts for Longhorns quarterback and New Orleans native Arch Manning. He wears perhaps the most famous last name in football across the back of his burnt orange jersey, and the same No. 16 his Hall of Fame uncle Peyton wore at Tennessee.
Speaking of Arch and Tennessee, I expect he’ll get about the same reception as Kiffin will next week at Tennessee when he returns to the scene of the job Archie Manning said he had a “cameo” role for in 2009.
Lastly, what do we make of the Whit Weeks factor? Will he really be able to come back and give the Tigers some productive snaps after being out since Sept. 26 with a broken leg? And if so, what kind of emotional boost would that be for LSU seeing his No. 7 sprinting out onto the field? Talk about potential drama.
Coming off a loss to Alabama last week (31-13) that put LSU in its current CFP predicament is nothing new for the Tigers. But losing in back-to-back home games would be. LSU hasn’t done that since way back in 1994, when Curley Hallman was on his way out the door.
The atmosphere could turn hostile even for the Tigers if this game goes like the Alabama game did, but going in it remains an LSU advantage. The Tigers have won 27 of their past 29 home games, albeit those home losses were blowouts against Bama in 2024 (42-13) and Texas A&M in 2025 (49-25).
There are a lot of reasons to be “Choosin’ Texas” in this game, to borrow the title from Ella Langley’s record-breaking hit song (27 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100). It starts with edge rusher Collin Simmons, who is probably the best player on the field for either team. LSU will have to keep him from running up his 10½ season sack total on Sam Leavitt more than the Tigers get to Manning for the Tigers to have their best chance to win.
It figures to be nothing like that combined 83 points these teams scored in 2019. This will be a grind-it-out-affair, with LSU having to take full advantage of what limited red zone opportunities it’s likely to get.
Will Tiger Stadium be the place where “opponents’ dreams come to die” once again Saturday night, or will the Tigers see their CFP dreams fade into the dark, cold night?
Whatever happens, Death Valley will shake, Arch Manning will get booed, and this will definitely be LSU’s last shot at glory.
1953 vs. 2026
Texas visits Tiger Stadium for the first time since Sept. 19, 1953, a 20-7 LSU upset over the No. 11-ranked Longhorns. What’s different between now and then? We have a look:
1953 2026
48 Number of U.S. states 50
$0.29 Gallon of regular gas $3.53
6,500 Miles of U.S. interstate 46,876
160 million U.S. population 343 million
125,629 Baton Rouge population 222,795
151,000 Austin population 1.002 million
Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th) President Donald Trump (47th)
Notre Dame No. 1 in AP poll Georgia
“From Here to Eternity” No. 1 movie “Godzilla Minus Zero”
“I Love Lucy” No. 1 TV show “Fox NFL Sunday”*
Chevrolet Bel Air Top selling car Ford F-series truck
“Vaya Con Dios” No. 1 Billboard song “Choosin’ Texas”
Les Paul and Mary Ford Ella Langley
*-Nov. 8 Nielsen ratings
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