LSU’s mission is to take advantage of its big home-field edge

NEW ORLEANS – There’s nothing neutral about the site of the College Football Playoff Championship Game.

The game between No. 1 LSU and No. 3 Clemson on Monday will technically be played at a neutral site in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome.

But Clemson knows it’s not a neutral site. LSU knows it. And the LSU fans are going to make sure it’s not a neutral site.

The home-field advantage was a popular topic during Media Day on Saturday morning at the Xavier University Convocation Center.

“Yeah, it’s a road game,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said.

Swinney said he knows a significant number of Clemson fans will be at the game and they’ll be as loud as they can be. But there just won’t be nearly as many traveling the nearly 600 miles from Clemson, South Carolina as there will be driving fewer than 100 miles from Baton Rouge – not to mention the LSU fans who don’t have to travel out all.

“It just worked out that way,” Swinney said. “We could have just played in Baton Rouge. You don’t know these things in advance, but I think it’s really cool for LSU. How cool is that, for them to be able to just hop on a bus and ride up the road 40 minutes or so. It would be like us playing for the National Championship in Greenville, South Carolina, 40 minutes up the road.”

Swinney has told his team that it faces a similar challenge to the one faced by Rocky Balboa in Rocky IV when he traveled to Moscow to fight Ivan Drago in Drago’s backyard. (Spoiler alert: Rocky won.)

“On defense we call it a road dog mentality,” Clemson linebacker Isaiah Simmons said. “You’ve got to bring a completely different game to it – not anything special necessarily but just a different mindset. It’s just like we always do like Rocky comparisons on our team. It’s like when Rocky fought Drago. I guess we’re in Russia.”

Rocky IV was technically set in the Soviet Union, but you get the point.

Simmons estimated that Clemson had about 30 percent of the crowd in Glendale, Ariz., when it defeated Ohio State 29-23 in the CFP Semifinal at the Fiesta Bowl two weeks ago.

“My last game was a road game,” he said. “I’m sure this one will be worse, I would assume. We’re in enemy territory. I think this is almost like worse than an away game. We’re in Louisiana. Everyone here is LSU. There’s not really many of us.”

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But there are going to be lots and lots and lots of LSU fans in the Superdome on Monday night.

“I’m excited to see how much purple and gold we have in the stadium,” LSU quarterback Joe Burrow said.

Clemson flew into town Friday afternoon. LSU bussed in later in the day.

“It’s very special for us to drive down the interstate yesterday with a great motorcade,” LSU coach Ed Orgeron said. “I know our players were looking forward to that.

“Just to show up at the hotel and to see all the fans there, just to hear them, just to hear them when we walk out here. When we left Baton Rouge, there was hundreds of people in front of the neighborhoods, and just seeing the little kids, understanding the magnitude of this football team and what it means to me and who we represent.”

Burrow said LSU had added motivation this season, knowing that the championship game was going to be in New Orleans.

“We went into the season saying if the national title is in New Orleans, we weren’t going to let anybody else be there,” Burrow said. “We had to be there. We weren’t going to be at home on the couch watching two teams coming in our state and watching them on TV.”

Orgeron said he couldn’t have written a better script than to have this team playing for a national championship in New Orleans.

But, he cautioned, the atmosphere in the Superdome doesn’t guarantee anything. LSU’s BCS Championship Game loss to Alabama in the Dome eight years ago demonstrated that, not to mention the still-fresh wound of the Saints’ home playoff loss to underdog Minnesota just six days ago.

“It’s going to be an emotional night when we do run out of the tunnel. I believe it’s going to be a home-field advantage,” Orgeron said. “But we have to take care of it. We have to use it to our advantage.”

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