The rain delayed LSU-Clemson by nearly 90 minutes. But once the game finally started, there wasn’t much suspense left to wash away. The home Tigers hammered the road Tigers 51-10 in Lane Kiffin’s first game inside Tiger Stadium. They piled up 309 rushing yards and scored 31 first-half points and handed Dabo Swinney’s team utter embarrassment. That calls for celebration, right? But not quite. 

Lane Kiffin wasn’t in the mood to celebrate. In his media appearance via LSU Tigers on TigerBait, the LSU coach shows he’s wary about what happens when players start believing their own headlines. He learned under Nick Saban, who famously warned teams about “rat poison,” which is essentially all the outside noise that can creep in after a big win. These days, that noise lives in a player’s pocket.

“That’s a big challenge,” Kiffin said. “We’ve been on that from the locker room immediately with them. Just knowing how that goes, and that’s a real thing, and it happens more now than it used to because of their phones. It’s constantly if they’re on their phones all day long about how great they are and so just managing against that.”

His concern is that players can spend the next week scrolling through posts, watching highlights, and reading how dominant they looked. Seven days later, they can walk into the next game thinking the result is already decided. Lane Kiffin isn’t interested in that. All that he wants is that their “focus has to be elite.”

Today, players get instant feedback from millions of fans through social media alerts right inside the locker room. Unlike past eras when coaches controlled the news cycle, modern players face nonstop online praise that makes losing focus after a blowout a serious risk.

LSU’s next challenge is different. The Tigers had two weeks to prepare for Clemson. Now they have one week to get ready for Louisiana Tech. Despite being early -34.5 favorites, he has a board hanging over LSU that reads, “LA Tech has beaten LSU before. Get your mind right. 1-0 is all that matters. Get over yourself! You ain’t done s—.”

While the final score made LSU’s offense look nearly flawless, Lane Kiffin isn’t letting the numbers fool him. The Tigers ran the ball 58 times on 94 offensive plays. Dilin Jones, who has emerged as the lead RB, carried the workload with 23 touches, 113 rushing yards, and two touchdowns.

Sam Leavitt was even more troublesome for Clemson. The former Arizona State QB ran for 113 yards and two touchdowns on 12 carries and kept turning broken plays into big gains. His mobility was a major reason LSU could keep pressure off the passing game. LSU also finished with more than 300 rushing yards and surrendered no sacks. Still, Lane Kiffin saw problems.

“I think offensive line, we can do some things better in there,” he said. “We got beat a few times on a few things… We did some really good things, but we’ve got to improve.”

That’s the weakness hiding underneath the 51 points. LSU’s O-line is experienced, with 93 combined starts among the projected starters, but this is still a new group playing together. Lane Kiffin specifically pointed to the guard spots and cautioned against assuming Sam Leavitt will always escape trouble when protection breaks down.

Well, one game doesn’t settle a season. For LSU, the interesting part starts now. Can Lane Kiffin’s team handle success without getting comfortable? Can the O-line clean up the mistakes that Clemson couldn’t punish? Still 11 games to decide.