August 1, 2025

It’s about to go down. LSU will kickstart its 2025 home game lineup with back-to-back night games, beginning with the Sept. 6 Louisiana Tech meetup and then launching straight into an SEC rivalry with the Florida game on Sept. 13.

Hyped yet? Well, there are even more reasons to celebrate. This season brings plenty of matchups worth hitting the road for. Faceoffs with Clemson in South Carolina and Vanderbilt in Nashville provide excuses to check some destinations off your travel list. Mike the Tiger’s Habitat turns 20 this year, marking two decades of face-to-face visits with the country’s only live tiger mascot. The Golden Band from Tigerland’s fourth-ever female drum major takes the field. Catherine Mansfield says she hopes that little girls who see the band marching this year will be inspired to dream big.

We’re covering it all in 225’s annual Tiger Pride issue. 225 has dedicated at least one cover story per year to LSU Athletics over our 20-year history, and we have also paid homage to the passion and pageantry of LSU Football in this dedicated standalone publication since its first edition in 2011. Each year, we chronicle the antics of local tailgaters, shining a light on groups like the Painted Posse, which preps for game day with layers upon layers of body paint. We pick the brains of sports writers like Matt Moscona and Mark Clements for preseason analysis.

And we always like to sit down with the athletes and coaches themselves to talk the art of the game. For the 2025 issue, we chatted with Ju’Juan Johnson, LSU’s latest positionless playmaker. He’s proven himself a versatile weapon in multiple roles—and now, he joins the quarterback room, learning from Garrett Nussmeier. We stepped into LSU’s Performance Nutrition Center for a look at the curated meal spreads that fuel LSU’s student-athletes across all sports. Because if LSU Baseball’s Men’s College World Series victory has reminded us of anything this summer, it’s that everything LSU does is championship caliber.

“(LSU is) a football school, but it’s also a women’s basketball school. It’s a baseball school. And, you can’t go without those other sports,” says Michael Johnson, executive chef of the Performance Nutrition Center. “They’re monsters, and so we celebrate them all.”

Geaux teams! We’ll see you on game day.