| Greetings from a swanky meeting room at the Windsor Court Hotel in New Orleans, where the SEC and Big Ten wrapped up several days of meetings Wednesday to decide how they want to run college athletcs. Their commissioners, athletic directors and football coaches talked about how they want the College Football Playoff to be formatted going forward, including doing away with this past season's automatic byes for the top four conference champions, as well as expanding the 12-team field among other topics. Topics that include the upcoming House settlement on revenue sharing for student-athletes, NCAA governance, etc. A lot of it is legalese-sounding stuff that makes the average college sport fan's eyes glaze over. Suffice to say, the SEC and Big Ten see themselves as the major movers and shakers in college athletics and are basically seeking to fill the power vacuum left by the once authoritarian NCAA. Is that good or bad? That's a tough question. But it is happening, and we'll begin see how much weight the leagues get to throw around once they meet with the rest of the CFP Management Committee next week in Dallas. One thing to keep an eye on: if there's CFP expansion again, with a guaranteed number of slots for SEC teams (most folks say four), it could lead to the league finally adopting a nine-game conference football schedule. Back to the scene in Baton Rouge, where the LSU women's basketball team is set to host Georgia at 8 p.m. Thursday on the SEC Network in the Tigers' second-to-last regular season home game. A game LSU could be playing without star forward Aneesah Morrow. If you're looking for news of LSU's baseball game at Nicholls State on Wednesday, the news is there was no game. Postponed on account of winter weather. Mother Nature does have power to all fields. In fact, two games between the Tigers and Colonels have been impacted. Koki Riley is here with all the details. Pivoting back to women's basketball, our Reed Darcey has a feature on the long road back to health for LSU forward Sa'Myah Smith. Read Reed below: ------------------------------ LSU's Sa'Myah Smith overcame a knee injury. Now she's reclaiming what it took from her. One afternoon in September, Sa’Myah Smith sat on a folding chair, rubbed her surgically repaired knee and encouraged more than two dozen middle-school students to set goals. A new season was only a few weeks away, but here was the LSU women’s basketball forward visiting a small, dark gym at Glasgow Middle School, only about 10 months into her recovery from suffering an injury that cut a promising sophomore year short. Smith had decided to start a mentorship program, and this stop was her first. “Keep reminding yourself why you’re doing it,” she told the kids. That advice lifted Smith through the recovery process from the second major knee injury of her career, the ACL, MCL and meniscus tears that shelved her for all but seven games of the 2023-24 season. This year — and the role she’s now filling for the No. 7 Tigers — served as the light at the end of that long, dark tunnel that divided her from the game. “That's my life,” Smith said Wednesday. “That's the thing that I love to do. I do it every single day. I work my butt off. Just being away from that, it was hard.” It’s easy to forget what that injury derailed. Before her true sophomore season ended, Smith had posted two 20-point games, two 10-rebound games and two three-block games. She had even started three of the seven contests next to Angel Reese and ahead of Aneesah Morrow, who’s now on pace to finish an illustrious career with the third-most rebounds in NCAA Division I history. Then Smith had to start over. The injury knocked her career off its upward trajectory, sending it down a long, arduous path of recovery instead. Smith had been down that road before: In high school, she tore the ACL and meniscus in her left knee. But this injury came with a fresh set of challenges, ones that took the form of extra competition — both internally and externally. While Smith rehabbed her knee, LSU scooped up 6-foot-5 forward Jersey Wolfenbarger from the transfer portal, and the Southeastern Conference added Oklahoma and Texas, two teams with rugged front courts. Because they lost Reese to the WNBA, the Tigers needed to make sure they could throw out enough size and length to compete for rebounds at the top of a tougher league. Only recently did Smith earn back those responsibilities and her role as the lead center, possibly for good. Ahead of the Tigers’ home game against Georgia on Thursday (8 p.m., SEC Network), the redshirt sophomore has started each of the last eight games she’s played. On Sunday in a loss to Texas, Smith helped LSU defend 6-4 Taylor Jones and 6-6 Kyla Oldacre for 36 minutes, enough to tie her career-high. “She battled,” LSU coach Kim Mulkey said. “She blocked shots. She didn't have a lot of the bulk, but buddy, she battled in there.” In the seven games LSU played from Dec. 15 to Jan. 9, the thin, wiry 6-2 Smith saw the floor for three fewer minutes per night than Wolfenbarger, the starting center for each of those contests. Then something changed. Mulkey put Smith back into the starting lineup before the Tigers beat Vanderbilt on Jan. 13, a move that has stuck in the eight games since. Smith now has seen more than twice as much run as Wolfenbarger has across the last seven games they’ve both played. Smith still isn’t scoring much — just 3.4 points per game on 38% shooting since Jan. 13. But she has corralled 17 rebounds and blocked five shots across LSU’s last two matchups, a close win over No. 15 Tennessee and a tight loss to the No. 2 Longhorns. “I thought Sa’Myah was excellent today,” Mulkey said after LSU beat the Lady Vols. “I thought she grew up. She got a deflection early in the game. She was altering shots. She didn't just get pushed and shoved around. She could have played probably in some of those minutes that I gave the small lineup because I just thought she grew up today.” Almost two months earlier, after a Nov. 15 win over Murray State, Mulkey took a different tone, saying Smith has “got to get back to being the Sa’Myah of old.” She was still worrying about her knee, still trying to rediscover her lateral quickness and still committing too many fouls, Mulkey said. LSU senior reserve Amani Bartlett wound up making her first career start over Smith three days later in a game against Troy, a decision Mulkey said she based on “focusing and paying attention in practice.” Smith still tallied nine points and eight rebounds in 16 minutes of action that night, then started the Tigers’ next six contests before ceding the job to Wolfenbarger for almost an entire month. “I didn't really want to put too much pressure on myself,” Smith said, “because I know I still had to deal with that, the injury and coming back, but I still had big goals. Still wanted to do what I can for this team.” Smith’s role is now on more solid footing, and her knee is strong enough to handle heavy minutes in intense, physical games. Yet she’s still making sure to remind herself, as she told those middle schoolers in September, that she wants to accomplish more. “The goal,” Smith said, “is definitely to get back to being the explosive, aggressive player that I am.” ----------------------------- Yours truly is also back with my weekly look at the LSU women's NCAA Tournament projections (P.S. — ticket orders for NCAA first- and second-round games at the PMAC are now being taken). Turning to other off-the-field football matters, a trial date has been set for LSU running back Trey Holly's case. Holly was charged with a shooting in his home Union Parish last year. And finally, the LSU men are basking in a two-game winning streak after beating South Carolina on Tuesday night, a win they can partly thank backup forward Mike Williams for. Our Toyloy Brown tells us how Williams has persevered through an up-and-down season. That's all for today folks. Other than the baseball, it's a pretty full plate. Thanks as always for reading and subscribing. Tell your friends about us, or even one or two people you don't like. We're not picky. Scott Rabalais | 