SHOCKING: Casagrande: Alabama delivered a traditional blow to LSU’s face.

This column is an opinion piece.

Inside Tiger Stadium, which was quickly filling up, the third-quarter clock was on 1:55 when an entirely unrelated event occurred.

The first play of Alabama’s seventh-night drive was a throw from quarterback Jalen Milroe to tight end CJ Dippre. With 105 seconds remaining in the quarter, he battled his way forward and fought past a lazy tackle attempt, eventually coming to a stop after 12 yards.

In a slog of a Saturday night in what is sometimes referred to as Death Valley, it turned out that those 12 yards would be the end of Alabama’s passing output.

On a gloomy night in Baton Rouge, Alabama delivered a gut punch that included that sentence.

The Crimson Tide’s final score of 42–13 would have been plenty, but there was something special about their performance. This was not the nerve-wracking victory over Georgia in September. In early November, a 75-yard touchdown heave is not necessary.

Not at all. Because it wasn’t a particularly high number in the LSU thumping.

Try 109.

A little over 13 minutes into the second half, Dippre’s lone catch brought the throwing yardage total to that level.

LSU was brutalized by Alabama in the traditional manner.

On Play 1 of Quarter 4, his 72-yard scamper would be Touchdown 4 of his comeback. After a few difficult weeks, he had dropped out of the Heisman front-runners’ ranks. After sprinting for 117 yards in the rout of then-No. 2 Georgia, the Tide senior was the talk of the sport, but that aspect of his game vanished entirely.

As an alternative, Milroe was a source of turnovers from the Tennessee, South Carolina, and Vanderbilt stretch. In those three games, he only ran for 57 yards total, or 1.5 yards per game if you’re interested in averages.

In terms of rushing yards on 12 runs, the final score on Saturday was 185. Against the 15th-ranked squad in the country, that is an average of 15.4 tries per game.

Clearly, Alabama was the more aggressive state.

This topsy-turvy season reached a new level on a night at the murderball flip regain its flow.