We love playing LSU for so many reasons. We love the fans, whose drunken menace could yield an invitation to a family wedding or your own murder depending on how many drinks you’ve had (catch them on the even-numbered drinks, and not on the odds). We love the teams, stacked with weird ancestral French names and athletes of shocking talent and equally amazing inconsistency. We love that you, like us, actually have a live, roaring carnivore living on your campus representing your university. We also like that you have a tiger, too.

More importantly we love that you understand living in the republic of hot, colorful squalor. Other states only joke about active malaria cases and voodoo curses being placed on state officials, but for Florida and Louisiana these are actual concerns. Both states frequently hold unsanctioned barfights against tropical weather, and usually lose these in horrendous fashion. Both understand that in many public restaurants a gun is a utensil. Both have large numbers of emergency room visit records containing the quotes “I thought you could eat that,” and “Please don’t call my husband/wife, and “boy that really is up there, isn’t it?”