LSU’s going to need a bigger eraser
Scooter Hobbs
It’s understandable, perhaps, if LSU probably wishes it had never heard the name Derrius Guice.
But wishing he would go away forever doesn’t make it so.
Sure, the school can ban him from all “future” LSU activities, as was reported Friday by The Advocate of Baton Rouge.
I suppose that will preclude him from picking up the school’s Knucklehead of the Year Award.
But, as somewhat the centerpiece of the school’s ongoing controversy over allegations of sexual misconduct, harassment and Title IX noncompliance, he probably wasn’t looking to reunite with the old gang anyway.
He has his own problems in his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C., where there are three separate allegations of sexual assault to go with the two while he was a Fighting Tiger that have to come to light after the release of the independent Husch Blackwell report.
But the Tigers football program will attempt the trickier punishment of rewriting history.
Impossible, of course.
But LSU’s strategy seems to be that if you can’t change the past, just grab a tube of Wite-Out, a forgotten weapon in the computer age, and blot out parts of it.
Specifically, the Tigers will expunge the records Guice piled up during his three-year run.
The report said LSU was “in the process” of adjusting his entries therein. And it might be a full-time job.
Whether LSU wants to admit it, the former running back is fairly well scattered throughout.
Among the highlights, he has three of four biggest rushing games in LSU history, along with the longest run ever.
It’s a ceremonial gesture at best. No harm done, perhaps, although it doesn’t really speak to the school’s newfound promise of taking these things seriously.
But, if you’re trying to keep score at home, Leonard Fournette, who played his last game in 2016, on Friday reclaimed the biggest rushing game in LSU history with 284 yards (against Ole Miss in 2016).
The 102,962 fans in Texas A&M’s Kyle Field later that year will swear they saw Guice rush for 285 yards against the Aggies, but, upon further review, apparently there were mistaken.
Also vanishing are the former third- and fourth-biggest rushing games that most fans of the day will swear Guice pulled off that same year at Arkansas and the next season against Ole Miss.
Fournette is probably too busy celebrating his Super Bowl victory with Tampa Bay to comment on regaining his record.
But the families of Sal Nicolo and Jesse Fatherree have regained some bragging rights, too.
It was once believed that Guice’s 96-yard run at Arkansas in 2016 had relegated them to a second-place toe for the longest run in LSU history.
Details are fuzzy, but Nicolo had a 94-yard run against Rice in 1952, Fatherree the same against Georgia in 1935.
Congratulations to both. They’re No. 1 again.
The LSU record book will say so.
Perhaps the revised records will even blot out the fact that Guice had 98 yards rushing against Notre Dame in the 2018 Citrus Bowl.
It didn’t set any records, but there is video evidence, immune to Wite-Out, that Guice played in the game. It was just weeks after he was accused by a 74-year-old grandmother of verbal sexual harassment while attending a high school game in the Superdome.
You can’t make that go away.
It would be far more convenient if they could expunge from the record some of the off-field transgressions.
To be fair, LSU’s overall response has been more than window dressing for the record book.
With two bills advancing Wednesday in the state Senate in the wake of LSU’s scandal, the school is greatly expanding its Title IX office on campus and beefing up the staff with personnel experienced in harassment cases. It is more clearly defining how complaints are addressed, investigated and disciplined.
That speaks to the future — to make sure the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated.
And it’s a start.
By comparison, it makes whittling out parts of the football record book look silly at best, grandstanding at worst.
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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU
athletics. Email him at
shobbs@americanpress.com