You should be here in the Bayou State tonight. The LSU Tigers, led by Coach Ed Orgeron and quarterback Joe Burrow (who will win the Heisman Trophy, for sure), won the SEC Championship tonight by destroying the Georgia Bulldogs. CBS Sports quoted Coach O saying that Joe Burrow is the “most important” player ever to come through LSU. What an incredible compliment — and, if you watched tonight’s game, you can understand why he said that. Just look at what Burrow did tonight, would you?

Joe Burrow is a magician. pic.twitter.com/PU55GUFXhx

— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) December 8, 2019

After the game, interviewed on CBS, Burrow said that he is so grateful to the people of Louisiana for allowing him to become “a Louisiana native.” Man oh man, we love that man so much. And we love Coach O. Straight off of Bayou Lafourche! You can’t get more Louisiana than that. Here’s an interview with his mama, Coco:

Look at this one too. Coach O and his mama are speaking a little Cajun French. Watch to the very end, when she talks about how much she misses Big Ed, Coach O’s father, who died of cancer in 2011:

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a couple of Coach O Christmas ornaments for my tree. Seriously, you can buy them right here.

My son Lucas and I watched the first half of the game at The Chimes East here in Baton Rouge. Here’s a View From My Table, with my lunch, and the first Tigers touchdown of the game:

What a night! We watched the second half at home. During the game, Lucas had to make a quick trip down the street to a friend’s house. When he came back in, I was shouting at him about all the scoring the Tigers had done while he was out. He said, “I knew something big was going on. As I was walking down the street, there was whooping and hollering coming from every house.”

It’s that kind of night here. What a season this has been! And it’s not over yet! I’m so proud to be an LSU alumnus, and so grateful to live in Louisiana. Coach O, Joe Burrow, and the 2019 LSU Tigers have given all us Louisianians an incredible gift. Thank you, men!

UPDATE: Magical words from the Washington Post:

They wear purple, the color that happens when blue and red mingle to make rarity. This fresh American powerhouse from Louisiana plays football the way football ought to be played in purple: vividly, magically, creatively. It just completed an autumn so kaleidoscopic that it’s still hard to process, a season in which it flattered purple even as purple is hard to flatter.

If anybody ever had more fun than LSU and its devotees had in the autumn of 2019, then we all should get to see it. Even as it wore mostly white in its 37-10 wreckage of No. 4 Georgia on Saturday in the SEC championship game, No. 2 LSU is headed for the playoff at 13-0 and as an apparent superteam with an enviable level of collaboration and a rare knack for adaptation.

LSU in 2019 has remade LSU, remade 58-year-old coach Ed Orgeron, remade quarterback Joe Burrow, remade long-overlooked 5-foot-8 running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire from Baton Rouge, remade life in Baton Rouge. Against a wall Saturday night, a man credited with a heap of the remaking, ­30-year-old passing coordinator and former William & Mary wide receiver and film geek Joe Brady, said of his receivers: “I want them dancing every single time they get in the end zone. That’s what football’s all about. Football’s — you’re supposed to be having fun.”

The color purple should feel like that.