In the midst of playing it straight and using last week’s open date to self-scout an LSU team going nowhere — a team that is only his until the end of the season — Ed Orgeron did allow his mind to occasionally wander a bit.

It was a bye week, so that means Alabama would be waiting on the other side, the Tide also taking their own traditional off date in advance of the Tigers’ visit.

“I was sitting there thinking well how things have changed since last time we were going over there,” Orgeron said of some rare in-season back-porch solitude.

Ah, 2019. The good old days.

If you count the ill-fated rematch from the 2011 season, it was the third time in that one decade that LSU and Alabama staged a Game of the Century.

“I knew we had a chance,”Orgeron remembered. “But we had to go through Alabama.”

It lived up to the billing, with LSU’s 46-41 track meet victory a testament to the way the game had changed since the classic 9-6 LSU overtime win in 2011, which was maybe the last fleeting breath for defense and field position winning ballgames.

“That was a big victory,” Orgeron said of the 2019 thriller that propelled LSU to the national championship and quarterback Joe Burrow to the Heisman Trophy. “Things are different now, but it is still LSU-Alabama.

Well, sort of.

Kind of.

LSU was the hottest team in America then, and the final score didn’t really reflect how many circles the Tigers ran around the Tide that day.

Orgeron was a popular and lovable rising star, his willingness to radically overhaul and update his offense — a decision born walking off the field after a 29-0 loss to the Tide in Tiger Stadium the previous season — heralded as an old Cajun learning new tricks and finally unlocking LSU’s talent potential.

Now, not so much.

Alabama is still Alabama, even with a loss and ranked No. 2 in the first College Football Playoff rankings.

But Orgeron is now a lame-duck coach and 4-4 LSU has lost its way so badly that CBS passed on the matchup for the first time since 2006.

This week it’s not even the top game in the Southeastern Conference. You’d guess Texas A&M (which beat Alabama) against Auburn (which beat LSU) gets that honor.

ESPN at 6 p.m. isn’t exactly like opening in Scarsdale, but it’s a come down nonetheless.

Is it even must-see TV?

A biblical run of injuries has the Tigers staggering into Tuscaloosa as a mere shell even of the LSU team that opened the season with a thud against UCLA in the Rose Bowl.

So the most pressing issue right now among LSU fans doesn’t seem to be how to crack the Tide defense, but rather who the Tigers’ next head coach is going to be.

Best I can tell, the list of candidates has been whittled to every coach in America with a winning record who is also not named Nick Saban.

That’s not Orgeron’s concern. That decision will be made beyond his rank, if not above his considerable pay grade.

Give him credit, he’s still playing it square, even to the point of recruiting (guys he’ll never coach) during the open date.

“It was a great,” he said of the recruiting trip. “Everybody still wanted to take their picture with me.”

He even picked up an interesting onside kick idea at a prep game.

He’ll probably need more than that in Tuscaloosa Saturday. If the game stays close enough for that kind of sorcery to come into play, the Tigers will have already shocked everybody.

Orgeron’s biggest obstacles may not be Tide quarterback Brice Young and receiver John Metchie.

It just might be that dreaded 1-2 punch of Doom & Gloom around the LSU program.

If LSU is allowing its best-case scenarios to fantasize back to 2019 or even 2011, it is probably barking up the wrong decade.

This would be more like 1993 when a Curley Hallman-led LSU team, 3-5 at the time and owning the worst loss in school history (58-3 to Florida), marched into Bryant-Denny Stadium and ended the Tide’s 31-game unbeaten streak.

It was known as the “When Pigs Flew” game for its shock value.

Pork hasn’t flown since, and isn’t likely to take to the air this week.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com