Right up top, let’s get straight Joe Burrow’s position in the epic poem of LSU football. Ed Orgeron has a big game to get ready for and doesn’t have a lot of time for preamble.
“I do believe he is one of the most important recruits in LSU history,” the Tigers coach declares.
Yes, it is a figure of fabled dimensions that LSU will hurl against Georgia in Saturday’s SEC Championship game. It is not just the numbers that have so elevated a transfer quarterback from Athens – not Greece, not Georgia, but Ohio – although those are prodigious. He’s thrown for an SEC-record 4,366 yards this season, with 44 touchdowns to go with but six interceptions. He leads FBS in completion percentage – a machine-like .783 – while attempting dramatically more throws than the No. 2 guy, like 152 more.
To Orgeron and this era of LSU football, what Burrow has come to represent is a tectonic shift, a player whose keen mind, competitive drive and package of physical assets were the perfect remedy for a program stuck in offensive purgatory. When Orgeron brought on a little-known NFL assistant Joe Brady, gave him orders to rewrite the LSU offense in a modern hand and then married that to Burrow, an entirely new day dawned for a program.
“The things that he has done – not to say we couldn’t do it with another quarterback – but he was the perfect quarterback at the perfect time for us to get into the spread offense,” Orgeron said.
“With what he’s done and the impact he’s had in two years, he’s probably going to be THE quarterback at LSU,” said Chris Blair, who has called all of Burrow’s exploits for the Tigers radio network.
Burrow’s journey to and through LSU has been quite the saga, one worthy of inclusion in any classics class. Buried at Ohio State, bearing the slur of suspect arm strength, Burrow knew he had to move on from Columbus when in the summer of 2017 he broke his hand, sabotaging his last best chance for playing time for the Buckeyes.
Having the freedom of a graduate transfer and two seasons of eligibility, he shopped his wares between programs of such diverse profiles as Cincinnati and LSU. At the time, Burrow hardly was the most notable quarterback stepping into the transfer portal. But Orgeron and LSU saw in him an answer to this program’s nagging void behind center. Over a crawfish dinner, the two parties came together behind their mutual needs.
“They didn’t know it was going to work either, we kind of took a chance on each other,” Burrow said this week. “It has worked out perfectly. Coach O sold me on his vision of what’s going on this year, and I sold Coach O and the staff on what I can do as well. It was kind of a perfect match. And the rest is history.”
This stranger arrived just three months in front of LSU’s 2018 opener, and wasted no time making a favorable impression on his new teammates. His performance in the conditioning tests at the start of camp has been accepted as the start of his local legend.
“I think Joe won the team over during the conditioning test,” safety JaCoby Stevens said. “I’d hear guys come back and talk about the way he was running. Other guys would try to race him, and it was just effortless for him. That conditioning test is hard, and he passed it with flying colors. He wasn’t coming in for him, he wanted to work, he wanted to earn our respect the hard way, and he did that.”
Stevens continued: “And when it came to us getting kind of chippy on the field, he wasn’t backing down or running away from challenges. He was right there in the midst of it. For me, that’s when he won my respect. He earned my respect even before he got named a starter for us.”
That’s another trait that has endeared Burrow to the Tigers and their faithful – the no-compromise style of play. When he runs the ball – more effectively than he gets credit for – it is with the idea of gaining yards not protecting himself. When he gets rocked, he tends to respond.
In last season’s Fiesta Bowl victory over Central Florida, Burrow was de-cleated by a blindside hit while trying to chase down a DB who had just intercepted him. He picked himself up, dragged himself back to the sideline, screamed at his coaches that he was well enough to return and went out and completed 19 of his next 28 passes for 363 yards and four touchdowns.
“You hate to say it, but in all the big games he’s had in his career, if there’s a slow start you’re almost up there in the booth thinking, OK, if somebody takes a cheap shot on him, he’s going to get going,” said Blair, the radio guy. “You don’t want to say it, obviously, because you don’t want him to get hurt. But my goodness, it happened early game against Texas A&M this year: A guy had a cheap-shot horse-collar on him out of bounds and, boom, five plays later, touchdown.”
Some have bookmarked last season’s 36-16 victory over No. 2 Georgia as the moment the Tigers recognized they could be something special with this guy at the controls. But that one was hardly indicative of what Burrow would become, as he completed a modest 15 of 30 passes for 200 yards (he did rush for two scores).
This thing went whole other level when Brady went full shotgun, no-huddle spread this season, tapping into all of Burrow’s abilities. A level unimaginable to Burrow just a year ago, one that has the 22-year-old senior (he turns 23 on Tuesday) poised as the Heisman Trophy favorite and a potential darling of the NFL draft’s first round. And yes, that’s him on the cover of this week’s Sports Illustrated – not as big a deal as it used to be, but still a rush for a guy from Athens, Ohio, whose dreams are being fulfilled in sudden storm surges now.
“No jinx, hopefully,” he smiles.
Giving his thoughts on Saturday’s game reveals the balance between the unfettered confidence Burrow has in this offense and the care that a mature team leader must take in expressing it.
It was put to him that Georgia could test his patience, that here was a game in which he might have to deal with the frustrations of not scoring on nearly every possession.
“I don’t want to go into a game thinking that not every drive is going to end in a score,” he answered. “I think we get disappointed if we don’t score. I think going into this game we’re going to keep our same mentality. We’re going to attack, we’re going to go fast, we’re going to throw the ball down the field. But also understand that this is one of the best defenses in the country, so you’re going to have to take what the defense gives you and march the ball down the field. They’re not going to give you anything easy.”
Here near the end of his rather epic two seasons in Louisiana, Burrow’s acclimation is nearly complete. For his last home game, he appeared pregame in a jersey with the name on the back altered to a whimsical Cajun version: Burreaux. (He was not allowed to wear it in-game, by humorless NCAA decree).
“He’s always in the cafeteria eating gumbo and turkey necks and everything. He’s a full Louisiana guy,” said defensive end Rashard Lawrence, himself from Monroe, La.
But is he really the real deal? Does he suck the head once he’s done with the crawfish tail, a true rite of passage in certain corners of the bayou?
“I don’t know if we got him there yet, but we’re going to work on it,” Lawrence said.
Some gaps in this LSU legend, hardly yawning, do remain.
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