JOHNSON: Southern no stranger to adversity — or how to get past it

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- Problem-solving is a fact of life on The Bluff.

I got that impression my first day covering Southern football last month, when I met Lenard Tillery at Southwestern Athletic Conference media day in Birmingham, Alabama.

In response to one of the several questions he was getting about Southern’s lack of spring practice, a result of APR-related NCAA sanctions, Tillery said simply: “We’re uCOsed to handling adversity at Southern University."

It was a bit of a shock to the system. Tillery was being candid rather than doling out a prepackaged response many athletes fall back on. It sounded, at first, like an admission of the affect Murphy’s Law was having on the campus at large.

But here’s the thing: He’s right.



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