BATON ROUGE — LSU’s 25th-ranked football team reported to Dallas here Thursday as the Tigers are less than a week away from facing ninth-ranked Texas in the SBC Cotton Bowl.
LSU arrived in Dallas at 11:30 a.m. after a one-hour charter flight from Baton Rouge. After checking into the Hyatt Regency in downtown Dallas, the Tigers spent the afternoon in meetings followed by a two-hour practice in shorts and shoulder pads at Texas Stadium.
LSU will workout again on Friday morning followed by Cotton Bowl Media Day at Texas Stadium after practice.
“We’ve had four days off so I wanted the players to come out and move around and get loosened up a little bit,” LSU coach Nick Saban said after Thursday’s practice. “We’ll get back in pads on Friday. When you come to a bowl game you want to get all of the bugs out the first day. The bus driver doesn’t know the right way to get to the stadium, they don’t know where to drop you off at the hotel, and the players don’t know where to go to eat and meet. We’re got all of those things ironed out today and I was still very pleased with the way we practiced.”
Thursday’s practice in Texas Stadium was a treat for several Tigers, including offensive tackle Rodney Reed, who grew up a fan of the Dallas Cowboys.
“It’s an honor to be able to practice in this stadium,” Reed said. “To practice on the same field that the Dallas Cowboys play on is great. To look up and see some of the names like Tony Dorsett, Roger Staubach and Tom Landry ring the stadium, it’s really an honor to be here.”
The Tigers spent Thursday night at the West End Market in downtown Dallas as the players and staffs from both LSU and Texas were treated to a barbeque buffet.
LSU and Texas will meet for the first time in football since the 1963 Cotton Bowl when the teams square off at 10 a.m. on New Year’s Day. The game will be televised to a national audience on Fox, LSU’s first appearance on the television network.