Louisiana state university is one of the South’s great colleges, and it has been around for a long time. Its first president was a young Army officer named William Tecumseh Sherman, and it once had a cheerleader named Huey Long.

At one time LSU also had an undefeated and untied football team, but that was in 1908, and nothing quite so exciting has happened in all the years since. Or at least not until now.

Maybe the reason is that LSU, in the past 50 years, has had nothing like Billy Abb Cannon and 11 other young men known as the Chinese Bandits.