Rabalais: Simply put, LSU should host Southern, Grambling if it plays others like SLU

BATON ROUGE, Louisiana -- The Halloween night in 1959, when Billy Cannon ran back his famous punt against Ole Miss in Tiger Stadium, Gerald Kimble swore you could hear the roars at Southern, where he and the Jaguars were also playing.

One day, perhaps very soon, the roars in Tiger Stadium will be for Southern. And for Grambling, too.

Saturday night, LSU opens its 94th season in Tiger Stadium with a game against Southeastern Louisiana. It will be just the second time the Tigers and Lions will have played in football, the only other way back in 1949. That was a decade before Cannon, in the days of Harry Truman and the Berlin Airlift. That makes LSU-SLU long on historical significance, if likely short on competitive balance.

In 2020, Nicholls State will visit Baton Rouge and play LSU in football for the first time. At that point, LSU will have played eight of the 10 other state football programs — SLU, Nicholls, Tulane, UL-Lafayette, UL-Monroe, Louisiana Tech, McNeese State and Northwestern State — all since 2009.

The only two LSU will have not played: Southern and Grambling.

It is an uncomplicated matter, really, simple and fair to resolve. LSU should host Southern and Grambling in football as well, if it is willing to play all the other state schools. Many of them — half, when you include Southern and Grambling — are Football Championship Subdivision schools.



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