Dealership pit stop helps LSU football team get the W

Louisiana State University football coach Brian Kelly had a surprise for his players as they traveled to their first road game of the season.

During the hourlong drive from their hotel to Mississippi State’s stadium in Starkville, Kelly had the team’s buses pull over at a car dealership deep in enemy territory for some extra warmups.

Flanked by a row of pickups in front of Cannon Chevrolet-Buick-GMC and Cannon Chrysler-Dodge-Jeep-Ram, the Tigers stretched out and ran a few drills. A few hours later, LSU routed the Bulldogs, 41-14.

“When we looked at the trip as being over an hour, I felt like I didn’t want the team sleeping and falling asleep on the bus,” Kelly told reporters. “There was a dealership right off the highway. We pulled the buses and we did our substitution drill just to get our guys up thinking about their substitution on special teams. We did a little light stretch. It was only about 10 minutes, but it got them up ... got them alert.”

ESPN opened its national broadcast of the Sept. 16 game by showing video of the team working out at the dealership. It was time-stamped 8:20 a.m., just after the store was scheduled to open.

The performance marked such a turnaround from LSU’s season-opening 24-45 blowout loss to Florida State that some fans suggested adding a dealership visit to the team’s weekly pregame routine. “Tigers got loose at the GMC, then ran like a Ferrari,” proclaimed one newspaper headline. “LSU suddenly has that new car smell,” quipped another.

“All good ideas are my ideas,” Kelly joked in his postgame news conference. “So it worked, so we’ll consider it my idea.”