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COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- Steady chants of: Keep coach O streamed out of LSUs locker room after the 25th-ranked Tigers got a 54-39 win over No. 22 Texas A&M on Thursday night.Its clear the LSUs players want interim coach Ed Orgeron to remain in charge. The question is what the schools adminstration plans to do.Derrius Guice ran for a school-record 285 yards and had four touchdowns and Danny Etling threw for 324 yards and two scores to give short-handed LSU the victory.I want coach O to stay, Guice said. We need somebody like coach O to lead us out there and hes done a great job since hes been here.The Tigers were playing without star running back Leonard Fournette and leading tackler Kendell Beckwith because of injuries. But Guice and Etling did plenty to allow LSU (7-4, 5-3 SEC) to handle Texas A&M, and gave the Tigers a 300-yard passer and a 200-yard rusher in the same game for the first time in school history.It certainly wasnt the first time Guice has had a big game this year, with Fournette struggling with an ankle injury for a big chunk of the season. His performance pushed his career-high rushing total to 1,249 and his four TDs were a career high. The game gave him one more yard than Fournette gained to set the schools single-game rushing record last month.Guice was asked if hed thought about breaking Fournettes record.I havent. My heads been on I miss him, Guice said. He was supposed to be out here with us tonight.The Tigers spoke this week about wanting a win to help boost Orgerons chances of keeping the job. But on Thursday reports surfaced that LSU was zeroing in on Houstons Tom Herman. The reports prompted LSUs vice chancellor and athletic director Joe Alleva and university administration to issue a statement denying they had chosen a new coach and praising Orgerons work since taking over in September when Les Miles was fired.Orgeron said after the game that he hadnt heard anything about his future, but that he would love to retain the job.We had to turn this team around and we did, he said. It was a ship that was sinking and we turned it around.While LSU wasnt at full strength, the Aggies (8-4, 4-4) were the healthiest theyve been in weeks, with defensive end Myles Garrett over an ankle injury and quarterback Trevor Knight back from a shoulder injury.Knight made an unexpected return after missing the last two games with the injury. Coach Kevin Sumlin said days after he was injured that he would miss the remainder of the regular season but would return for A&Ms bowl game. Instead he returned to throw for 211 yards and three touchdowns before leaving the game late in the fourth quarter with what looked to be a knee injury.We were 6-0 and No. 4 in polls at one point. Here we are three weeks later, and we are unranked (in College Football Playoff rankings), Knight said. That is disappointing. I dont think it is a lack of effort or lack of character or anything. We played some good teams that came up with good wins. I wish I could point the finger at what went wrong and why we lost the games, but the point is, we didnt play as well as we needed to on the back stretch.The Aggies cut the lead to 10 with a field goal on the opening drive of the second half, but soon Guice was at work again. His second 45-yard touchdown run came on LSUs next drive to extend the lead to 27-10. Texas A&M failed to convert on fourth-and-4 to give the Tigers the ball back and Guice got to the end zone again, this time on a 6-yard run, to make it 34-10.Texas A&M cut to deficit with touchdowns three times after that, but each time LSU responded with TDs of its own to keep the game out of reach.THE TAKEAWAYLSU: The Tigers responded to the adversity of missing their top players with a nice win to cap what has been a disappointing regular season.Weve been through some stuff man and were resilient, Orgeron said. Just proud of this football team.TEXAS A&M: The Aggies missed a chance to improve their bowl status and possibly move into a prestigious New Years day bowl game despite the return of Knight.POLL IMPLICATIONSLSU: The Tigers should move up a few spots and with the win, but just how much they rise will depend on what happens the rest of the weekend.TEXAS A&M: The Aggies will drop out of the poll after their third loss in their last four games.1,000-YARD RUNNERSBoth teams had players eclipse the 1,000-yard mark with their performances on Thursday. Texas A&Ms Trayveon Williams had 68 yards rushing to give him 1,024 yards this season, making him the first true freshman in school history to run for 1,000 yards. Guice is the 12th player in LSU history to reach 1,000 yards rushing and he has 1,685 yards rushing in his two-year career.UP NEXTBoth teams will wait for their bowl pairings.---More AP college football at www.collegefootball.ap.org and https://twitter.com/AP-Top25 Cheap Nike Free China ., for the next three years with the signings on Monday of Daryl Townsend and Michael Carter. Wholesale Nike Free . PETERSBURG, Fla. http://www.cheapnikefree.net/ . Its sharpness matched my mind. This was no night to go to sleep. Nike Free Wholesale China . Its sharpness matched my mind. This was no night to go to sleep. Cheap Nike Free Wholesale . The (11-11-4) Jets are seventh in the Central Division with 26 points. Fifth place Dallas and sixth-seeded Nashville also have 26 points, but the Stars have three games in hand on Winnipeg while Nashville has two. John Saunders first sat down with us to host The Sports Reporters in the fall of 2001. The great Dick Schaap had been hosting the show for the 10 years or so before that. But Dick had just undergone hip surgery that went tragically wrong, none of us knowing at the time that he would never come out of the hospital.I knew full well about Johns body of work at ESPN all the way back to 1986, about his talent and versatility, his friendship with Jim Valvano, the tireless work John had done for The V Foundation for Cancer Research as a founding board member. But I was about to learn, starting with that first Sunday and then across all the Sundays, about all the good in him, all the humor and intelligence and immense decency. Most of all, I would learn about his gift of friendship.If you have ever watched The Sports Reporters, you know that we have long been having the kind of conversations about sports that they now have about politics all over the television dial on Sunday mornings, with Mitch Albom and Bob Ryan and Bill Rhoden, with Jemele Hill and Howard Bryant and Israel Gutierrez and all our other panelists.And what I knew by September 2001, after all my Sundays with Schaap, was how easy he made hosting the show look. What no one knew at the time was whether John would even want to be the full-time host, be part of the conversation on a permanent basis, be working with grown-ups so often acting like great, big kids. Or people talking sports at the end of the bar.But John was great from the start.He was tremendous and generous, allowing the rest of us to look good -- sometimes no small feat, believe me. But he really was that good at this kind of television. Best of all, people liked John Saunders. Somehow he had the gift that the very best broadcasters have, in that the people who watched him felt as if he were their friend, too. He made them feel like they were part of our conversation.I go through airports, John said, and people are always telling me the same thing, that sometimes theyre talking right along with us.Later I would tell him that, because of his grace and charm and ability to keep the whole thing under control, he was like Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love, bringing order to the kids in the back of the classroom.After the first show, I thought to myself, What in the world did I get myself into? John said once, laughing.My dear friend John Saunders died suddenly on Wednesday at the age of 61. He was a husband to Wanda and a father to two daughters. His brother Bernie, his best friend, was a hockey player, just as John was. We used to joke that John was another guy who came down out of Canada and didnt just take up one good job in television -- it was as if he wanted to take up all of them. He was a brilliant studio host, he could do play-by-play and he could somehow navigate, with his usual grace, all the housekeeping of the championship ceremonies after the last game of the college football season.He made it all look easy, Mike Breen, the voice of the NBA on ESPN and ABC, said on Wednesday morning. I used to marvel at the way he made all his jobs look that easy, even though those of us in the business know they werent.John had all the best stories about Valvano, and not just the funny ones, but about all the times, at the end of Valvanos loong, terrible season battling cancer, when he would hold Valvano in his arms as a way of stopping the chills, even in the hours before Jimmy stood up and gave one of the most moving speeches in the history of sports, his Dont give up, dont ever give up speech at the ESPYS.ddddddddddddeeing how weak he was, I still dont know how he gave that speech, John would always tell me. I dont even know how he was able to stay standing. That was about his heart.Johns heart understood Vs. John had a ton of heart himself. He was an ex-hockey player, and he underwent so many surgeries because of his hockey career. He also suffered from diabetes, and there were some Sunday mornings when we would all see how weak he was when he showed up in our green room, his hands shaking, drinking orange juice, just trying to feel well enough to do the show. But he always did. And he would, because of his great heart, make it look easy again.He had a terrible fall one Saturday when he was hosting his college football shows on ABC. Another time there was a car accident, one John was lucky to survive. Of course, he came back from the accident and came back from the fall and, before long, was back in his chair on Sunday morning.There was a Sunday morning when he wasnt feeling particularly well, so right before he started talking at the top of the show, I leaned over and tapped him on the knee. He got through the show, of course. But it became a tradition with us, or a superstition. I did it every Sunday after that, all the way to our last show together a couple of weeks ago. That day he was telling me again how people were always asking why Lupica was hitting him every Sunday just as the show started.John laughed, again, and said, I tell them that your hitting me on one of my bad knees was just your way of showing how much you love me.There was no way to properly express, or explain, the love that I felt for John Saunders, who loved Wanda and his girls; who loved that he had lived long enough to see Barack Obama become president of the United States; who loved hockey, and his work, and the life his work had given him once he got to this country, permanently, from Canada. And you should know how much he loved doing his parting shots on Sunday; they were beautifully written, passionate when they had to be, funny when they had to be. But always smart.We have had two permanent hosts on The Sports Reporters: Mr. Schaap and Mr. Saunders. Ive had the uncommon good fortune to sit with both of them more than anybody in the history of the show. It should have been a hard thing for John to follow Dick. It became one more thing that he made look extraordinarily easy. In another time in sports, often the highest praise for professionalism was to say this: It was like watching Henry Aaron hit. Sitting next to John Saunders was like that. It was exactly like that.He is survived by his family, and his friends, and by this network, and by his business. John made his living with words. So many of us do. This is my own way, with memory and profound sadness, of saying one word I never expected to say this soon, not to the big man on my right for all those Sunday mornings: Goodbye. ' ' '