Coach Lane Kiffin’s LSU Tigers lost a pulsating Week 6 SEC clash 35-34 to the Kentucky Wildcats in one of college football’s biggest upsets of the season. The loss dropped Kiffin’s Tigers to 4-2 after their earlier loss to the Ole Miss Rebels in Oxford, and fans and analysts are already sifting through the permutations for LSU’s College Football Playoff hopes.
This week, Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram II rang the alarm bell for Kiffin’s team’s hopes for the season.
Mark Ingram II Delivers Brutal Verdict on Lane Kiffin’s LSU
During Tuesday’s segment of the “Triple Option” podcast, Ingram detailed LSU’s treacherous schedule and predicted that the SEC giants’ season might be over.
“They might be cooked,”Ingram said. “They’ve got big games left. You’ve got Mississippi State with Kamario Taylor; you’ve got Bama, who I feel are a much better team than we’ve seen in the past; they play physical. Obviously, we lost a close game. You have Texas. You have Tennessee, which is never a slouch.
“I easily could see them dropping one of those four. At this stage, I’m sorry to all my Bayou Bengals, but I think y’all are cooked at the moment. They run that table, they’re in the playoffs. They win those games, they’ll be in the SEC championship more than likely, maybe not. But they’ll be in the playoff.”
As Ingram mentioned, the Tigers are still yet to play the No. 16 Mississippi State Bulldogs, No. 6 Alabama Crimson Tide, No. 7 Texas Longhorns, and No. 14 Tennessee Volunteers, leaving their season hanging precariously by a thread.
The only saving grace for those matchups will be that three of them will be in Baton Rouge.
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Kiffin has been widely criticized for his decision to punt when LSU faced a fourth-and-one on its own 43-yard line with 1:37 remaining against Kentucky. The decision allowed the Wildcats to march down the field, tie the game, and win the contest in overtime, calling into question Kiffin’s decision-making despite a reputation as an aggressive playcaller.
The charismatic coach became college football’s No. 1 villain last year when he left Ole Miss before the Rebels embarked on their maiden College Football Playoff journey to join LSU.
Kiffin aggressively rebuilt LSU’s roster through the transfer portal, assembling a class the university describes as the nation’s top-ranked transfer haul.
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Kiffin was backed to the hilt by boosters in Baton Rouge to get the program ready to contend for college football’s biggest accolades. Even before the season started, Kiffin was under the spotlight for his decision to recruit former NFL players deemed eligible to return to college football, which nearly turned the Tigers into pariahs amid the SEC’s legal action against the program.
Despite that move backfiring, Kiffin was expected to turn the Tigers into an SEC powerhouse immediately, but the season already looks in danger of slipping out of their hands before October ends.
The Tigers were one of the biggest week-over-week movers in PFN’s College Football Playoff Meter, dropping by 41.6% from Week 5’s 52.8% chance to clinch a berth in the 12-team field.
This article originally appeared on Pro Football Network.