PALMER: Kiffin’s job is to bring the CFP to Tiger Stadium

LSU Athletics

By Hunt Palmer

We can debate the modern changes in college football.

NIL has created different circumstances. The transfer portal giveth and taketh away. Conference realignment has fractured rivalries and generated new ones. The College Football Playoff is good, but it’s imperfect.

Plenty of that is up for discussion.

What isn’t is the wonderful reality of on-campus playoff games between monster brands. The last two Decembers have given us Tennessee at Ohio State, Clemson at Texas, Alabama at Oklahoma and Miami at Texas A&M.

The weather has turned. The stakes are high. The crowds have been full throat.

All I can think about is what Tiger Stadium will feel like when it becomes center stage.

I’ve watched national championship games from the stands as a 15-year-old and a postgame show host. I’ve seen the pinnacle of the sport.

I’ve watched dozens of games, both big and relatively insignificant, in Death Valley. It doesn’t get any better.

I’m ready for those two to converge.

LSU’s last 25 years have featured the highest of highs. The Tigers belong in college football’s 2000s penthouse with Alabama, Ohio State and Clemson. Three national titles award you that status. However, LSU hasn’t sustained the excellence like the Buckeyes and Crimson Tide.

That’s Lane Kiffin’s job.

Truly elite regular seasons allow for a bye in the first round of the College Football Playoff. Really good ones may send the Tigers on the road to one of the iconic stadiums in the country. Right in the middle of those two means a home game in Tiger Stadium.

And you know the TV executives would do everything they could to get that game at night.

I’ve logged 30 years in Tiger Stadium and have only missed two home games (and a fake home game against South Carolina in 2015) in the last 20 years. I’ve seen the best of what it has to offer.

Scenes from This is Spinal Tap circulated this week in the wake of Rob Reiner’s tragic death. One of them depicts a band member explaining how one of his guitar amplifiers “goes to 11”.

Every so often, Tiger Stadium goes to 10. That feeling fuels our fandom. It quite literally allows me to do what I do for a living.

A playoff game would take things to 11.

If Kiffin can create that in Oxford on this Saturday, surely, he’s paving the way to doing so in Baton Rouge.

For now, I’ll watch Kyle Field and Autzen Stadium bookend a playoff slate with two of the best environments in the sport.

And I’ll think about what the best one look like when that day comes.