Hillary Clinton probably doesn't care that you spent prime-time Saturday night watching the Hogs on ESPN rather than her performance in a strangely scheduled debate on CBS.
She was never much for Razorback football herself. When her husband was governor and dragged her to the 50-yard line at War Memorial Stadium on Saturday nights, she'd bring a book. She left the hog-calling and the overly conspicuous rooting to his self-styled personal spectacle.
She won't carry Arkansas in the general election next year. The state has plunged over and down the red cliff.
So it is of no consequence that, had you watched the debate, you'd have beheld her experiencing almost as bad a Saturday night as the Hogs had a good one.
She was on the defensive in much the way LSU was on the defensive against an end-around.
Yes, Democratic insiders surveyed after the debate overwhelmingly proclaimed Clinton the clear winner. But that's like the Hogs beating Tennessee-Martin while giving up more than 500 yards.
Hillary is not running against the two imposters in her primary. She is running against a standard she didn't meet. She is running mostly in the context of the general electorate, which had reason to be underwhelmed.
Because of the Paris horror, CBS changed gears and opened the debate with a series of questions on ISIS and international affairs and national security.
Bernie Sanders' campaign manager reportedly whined to CBS about the change of focus. That would be telling of Sanders' weakness, and absurd. A president must deal fluidly with more than one thing. You can't be president for income inequality only.
Foreign policy and national security were supposed to play to Hillary's wheelhouse. But her debate responses during the ISIS-Paris segment turned out to be more detached and professorial than commanding.
She said several things that were analytically wise. But she said nothing forceful that provided any assurance that she has a clearer plan than anyone else for the thing she declared essential, which is the destruction of ISIS.
The only thing she did make clear forcefully is that ISIS is not America's sole responsibility, but a coalition's, one for which we must provide leadership.
Hillary was accurate and honest about the complexity of the ISIS menace and the crime "network" with which we find ourselves at war.
For example: We made a triumphant military move over the weekend, dropping fliers telling civilians to get out quickly and then bombing to smithereens 116 oil transport trucks that are key to the lucrative smuggling operation that underwrites ISIS.
But that doesn't mean a crazed creep is not lurking around some great and free Western city strapped to a bomb.
Still, Hillary managed mostly to remind me of then-President George W. Bush in 2004. In a debate that he lost to John Kerry, Bush fielded every question about his misbegotten Iraq war--which Hillary backed--by lamenting that the Middle East is "hard work."
We know that it's hard work. We're looking for an aptitude and a plan.
Let me defend Clinton on one point that Republicans love to criticize: She wouldn't say that we are at war with "radical Islam." She said only that we are at war with jihadists or terrorists or extremists.
The point is that, amid all the complexity, America does not need to tiptoe anywhere close to a vague intimation of a religious war.
We're fighting crazies who have nothing to do with any legitimate interpretation and application of any religion.
If a band of self-described evangelical Christians began murdering women walking into abortion clinics, would we say that our police are seeking to arrest radical evangelical Christians? I doubt it. We'd probably say our police are seeking to arrest mad murderers.
Actually, foreign policy was not Hillary's lowest point of the debate.
She spent too much of the balance appearing somehow to be defending Wall Street--because she historically has taken a lot of money from big finance and because she would not go as far as Sanders, which is too far, and say Wall Street's "business model is greed and fraud."
All she could think to say in response to Sanders' charge that essentially she was on the take from Wall Street was that she worked hard as New York's senator to help rebuild Wall Street after 9/11.
She shouldn't have reached for the irrelevant and mildly shameful cover of 9/11. She should have said simply: "Bernie, old buddy, here's the real quid pro quo: Wall Street gives me money and I give them hell ... which, by the way, happens to be what the Razorbacks are giving LSU right now on another network."
She's not going to win Louisiana either.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 11/17/2015