Last Modified: Monday, October 24, 2011 12:49 PM

BY SCOOTER HOBBS / AMERICAN PRESS

BATON ROUGE — While sifting through the debris of LSU’s latest shock and awe path of destruction, this time 45-10 of defending national champion Auburn, suddenly the questions changed for the diligent worker ants in the press box.
When the night’s scribbling and typo-ing was done, the idle elevator chit-chat changed.
It wasn’t about who was better, LSU or Alabama?
That will be decided in plain view, in prime time it was confirmed Sunday, on what has come to be known around the college football world simply as “November 5th.”
It’s as if no other games will be played that day as the world stops to watch what is being described as the “real national championship game,” the BCS be damned.
It was hinted at, the date circled,  as far back as the summer. Now the prelims have played out more dominantly than even expected and doesn’t it seem a little too convenient that both the Tide and Tigers will have open dates leading up to the main event?
Perhaps both knew there would be far too much hype involved to squeeze into one measly week.
It may be too big even for twitter. Facebook is throwing an extra log on the fire.
But there’s still almost two full weeks to go, so the over-analyzing will soon begin on a game that seemingly can’t be over-hyped.
So the question in the elevator was a little appetizer before the real hype begins.
Looking back at the smoking ruins the Tigers had just left a proud Auburn team in — which didn’t look a whole lot different from the previous seven conquests —  it begged the question.
And it was taken in context of when the biggest summer question was, could the Tigers navigate a killer schedule?
Anyway, it was asked:
Is this the best LSU team of all time?
Interesting.
Surely, the 1958 team has to be in the discussion, but it’s like comparing apples and oranges to single-bar face masks and high-tops.
Which is dang near impossible.
So really, the question is, is this the best LSU team of the new millennium?
I, for one, don’t recall Curley Hallman ever unleashing anything like this.
So we’re basically talking about the Nick Saban-Les Miles era, which conveniently enough will be the two featured players in the Game of the New Millennium.
It’s a comparison, I guess, with the national championship teams of 2003 and 2007.
I always suspected the 2006 team might have actually been LSU’s best. But it had two losses, done in by bad coaching (not throwing against Auburn until it was too late) and Murphy’s Law (catching every bad break imaginable despite otherwise running circles around a Florida team that would go on to win the national championship).
I would argue that it wasn’t that team’s fault that, the very next year, it was OK to lose two games and still reach the national championship game.
It had the Good JaMarcus Russell — still in the 260-pound range — and three first-round draft picks for him to throw to.
But I guess you have to have the hardware to get into the discussion. And the 2006 team certainly didn’t have the consistency you’ve seen from this year’s team.
So we’ll leave it to 2003 and 2007.
The 2003 team had a defense that would compare to this year, and the 2007 team might have had a closer balance between defense and offense, with a more explosive attack sometimes covering up for a somewhat hit-and-miss defense.
That 2007 team also Matt Flynn, who is one of LSU’s most underrated quarterbacks, and you slander him to call him a “game manager.”
That Damn Strong Football Team, as Les Miles so eloquently put it, was clearly the best team in the country WHEN IT WAS HEALTHY.
That wasn’t real often, as it limped through the second half of the season on guts and guile and a whole of lot good fortune.
But Ohio State saw what it was capable of after a month’s R&R.
And that’s the thing about this year’s team.
A sprained ankle or two, even a suspension or three, doesn’t bother them (nothing does).
You can go through the LSU teams in question position by position and get varying opinions. But don’t try to go two-deep or it’s a rout for the current edition.
This may or may not be the best LSU team, but it is surely stocked the deepest not only with talent, but with guys who can’t wait to get on the field and prove it.
Auburn was just the latest example, the most glaring of which was losing running back Spencer Ware, who was thought to be the offensive key —and having seldom-used freshman fullback Kenny Hilliard score two touchdowns as a tailback.
Or losing Tyrann Mathieu himself — and having his fill-in at cornerback, Ron Brooks, play the little Honey Badger role to perfection, even score a touchdown, albeit without the taunting.
It’s what sets this team apart.
“We recruit talented young players and they go to the field,” Miles said of his simple philosophy. “We don’t redshirt them. They go on the field and they contribute.”
Their season is not yet defined, of course, and that will probably come on the long-circled “Nov. 5.”
But, for the record, neither of those recent LSU championship teams played anything as scary as this Alabama team.
But that’s a variable for another day.