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For a school that has the football history LSU has, there’s a notable lack of monuments around Tiger Stadium.
In a league where statues are part of most stadiums’ decor, there isn’t a single football player or coach memorialized with a statue around Tiger Stadium.
Not one of Billy Cannon, the school’s lone Heisman Trophy winner (although there is one off campus), nor one of any coach. Not Charley Mac. Not Paul Dietzel. And surely not Nick Saban.
So here’s my proposal: LSU should hold off on building one until they finally get that quarterback.
You know what I mean by that quarterback.
A guy that carries a program for a couple of years and becomes the face of a championship team. A Cam Newton. A Johnny Manziel (if you can just conveniently ignore his pro career). A Deshaun Watson.
It’s the kind of player LSU is seemingly never able to get, even if it can get just about anything else. A Leonard Fournette at running back. An Odell Beckham and Josh Reed at receiver. A Kevin Mawae on the offensive line. A Glenn Dorsey on the defensive line. Patrick Peterson and Tyrann Mathieu in the secondary.
But where are the quarterbacks?
We saw the next great prospect’s career possibly fizzle before our eyes when junior Brandon Harris was benched in the first half of Saturday’s 34-13 win over Jacksonville State. It may not be the last we see of Harris, but even his biggest supporters are coming to the point where they have to admit that while his LSU career may be salvageable, he likely won’t be more than just serviceable.
Danny Etling, his replacement, doesn’t come with a glowing résumé, having lost the starting job at Purdue before relocating down south. At best, he can manage a talented offense.
So the streak of average play at quarterback continues, inexplicably, for LSU. Probably, at least, for the near future.
What’s amazing is no school has more players on current NFL rosters than LSU. Yet the Tigers can’t seem to find that guy under center.
We know the recent history. Jarrett Lee and Jordan Jefferson getting to play because the Ryan Perrilloux dismissal. Zach Mettenberger’s one good year. Anthony Jennings. Harris. And now, Etling.
Somewhere in this stretch dating back to the 2008 season, the year after the Tigers’ last national championship, LSU became a toxic place for quarterbacks, and Les Miles and company haven’t been able to identify and keep the right guys.
Harris, a four-star prospect in the 2014 class out of the north Louisiana city of Bossier City, looked like the guy that might break that curse. He has NFL arm strength, good size and mobility that give him plenty of bullets to choose from.
But, up to now, Harris has lacked other things. He reads the defense slowly, has poor footwork leading to inaccurate throws and doesn’t get the ball off on time. When Etling came off the bench Saturday to rally the Tigers to a 34-13 win over Jacksonville State, his performance sort of confirmed those suspicions.
Etling hit tight end DeSean Smith for a 46-yard touchdown pass. He found the Tigers’ No. 3 receiver, D.J. Chark, for a big first-down pass. He dumped the ball to running backs. Etling was far from perfect, but he successfully did enough different things from Harris to confirm what the starter was lacking.
With the possible exception of Mettenberger, who put together a magical senior year in 2013 while slinging big-league fast balls to future Pro Bowlers Odell Beckham Jr. and Jarvis Landry, the Tigers quarterbacks lately have all had fatal flaws.
It wasn’t always like that, but LSU has had trouble putting together its best talents with its best results. JaMarcus Russell was a top NFL Draft pick but couldn’t lead LSU to BCS promise (and had an infamously poor NFL career). Matt Mauk and Matt Flynn both won national championships in their only full year as starters but weren’t individually lauded as elite players at their positions.
Before that, LSU had trouble picking them. Tommy Hodson was a great in the ’80s, but couldn’t get LSU to championship promise. One might argue that 1970s-era star Bert Jones, who went on to NFL prominence with the Baltimore Colts, is the greatest LSU quarterback ever (along with Hodson). Some like David Woodley, who was LSU’s dual-threat quarterback before the term was coined.
Warren Rabb led LSU to a national title in the ’50s. Before that, the iconic Y.A. Tittle went to school in Baton Rouge.
LSU missed on a lot more. Shreveport native Terry Bradshaw went to Louisiana Tech, and his high school successor, Joe Ferguson, went to Arkansas. Both were quality starters in the NFL in the ’70s and ’80s. Segregation kept James “Shack” Harris from being recruited by LSU out of Monroe, and there was a stigma against black quarterbacks when Doug Williams came out of Zachary, just north of Baton Rouge.
More recently, both Manning brothers, Eli and Peyton, grew up in New Orleans, but went to other SEC powers. Kordell Stewart came out of suburban New Orleans and played at Colorado. Dak Prescott came out of suburban Shreveport and starred at Mississippi State and, most recently, five-star stud Shea Patterson came out of Shreveport — with a year at IMG Academy in Florida — and chose Ole Miss.
But here’s the thing: You don’t necessarily need the five-star stud to produce championship results.
Think back to the height of Miami’s powers in the 1990s and early 2000s. They’d take an average talent, like Ken Dorsey, and he’d look like a genius by distributing the ball to the likes of Reggie Wayne, Santana Moss, Jeremy Shockey or maybe he’d hand off to a Clinton Portis, all future NFL stars.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Except for LSU, having a similar array of skill position talent hasn’t led to quarterback stardom.
But that’s all the Tigers need. They can put top-tier recruits on the field at all the skill positions. All they need for a quarterback to do is figure out which stud is going to be open and get him the ball.
Obviously, that’s easier said than done, otherwise, LSU would have solved this problem long ago.
Still, we can all agree that if you land top 10 recruiting classes every year, surely you can find a guy who can run the offense efficiently?
Find him and LSU may finally have an offense to match its defense, and it might get the championship results that match its NFL-producing numbers.
And if the university doesn’t build a statue of the guy, the fans might do it for them.
