Ad Disclosure
BATON ROUGE, La. — When talking about teammate Donte Jackson on Thursday, LSU cornerback Kevin Toliver threw out a title like it was just common knowledge.
“We have Donte Jackson, the fastest man in college football,” Toliver quipped without the slightest hesitation.
Jackson earned the title by running a 6.66 60-meter dash for the LSU track team last spring. It was, at the time, the fastest 60-meter run by a college football player in the track season.
Jackson isn’t the only defensive back who has a title. There’s the leader, cornerback Tre’Davious “Shaq” White, the next first-round draft pick at cornerback for LSU, who passed up sure NFL money to return for his senior season. There’s Jamal Adams, the All-American candidate at safety. There’s Toliver, the “next” great cornerback after White.
When you start listing all these stars and all the attention they’ve earned, it’s easy to forget one nagging point about them as a group.
They weren’t very good last year.
LSU, which has claimed the “DBU” moniker since the days of Patrick Peterson and Tyrann Mathieu for consistently producing elite defensive back talent, finished 12th in the SEC in pass efficiency defense in 2015 and also 12th in total pass defense in a 9-3 season.
Particularly frustrating was the fact that the usually ball-hawking Tigers secondary finished third from last in the SEC in interceptions with just 10.
So while the focus of many was squarely on the inability of the LSU offense to complete passes, maybe some of the attention should have been on the inability of the Tigers’ defense to prevent completed passes.
Does that mean this group of defensive backs is needing to redeem the “DBU” name?
Not if you ask them.
“The statistics do mean something,” Toliver said. “But we’re ‘DBU.’ They’re chasing us. We’re not chasing them.”
Toliver says it with conviction. He doesn’t come across as somebody pridefully hanging on to an outdated claim. He comes across as a true believer, not a hint of doubt in his body language.
Perhaps this is the result of a successful offseason conditioning program. Not so much the physical conditioning one normally hears about with players getting bigger, faster and stronger. But mental conditioning. Despite some struggles last year, defensive backs coach Corey Raymond has his players believing in themselves no less than they ever did when teams with Peterson, Mathieu, Morris Claiborne, etc., were putting up dominant numbers.
Or maybe it’s just the result of years of talent accumulation at the position in Baton Rouge and the swagger that comes with it.
White, Adams, Jackson and Toliver were all five-star recruits by at least a couple of scouting services coming out of high school. Some of that comes from Louisiana’s fertile recruiting ground — Jackson and White are both in-state prospects.
But a big part of it is LSU’s recruiting reputation. The Tigers plucked Toliver from Jacksonville, Fla., and Adams from Hebron, Texas. That kind of mix continued this year with LSU bringing in highly regarded Floridian Saivion Smith to go with five-star New Orleans metro prospect Kristian Fulton.
Only safety Rickey Jefferson, a consensus four-star prospect coming out of high school, starts in the Tigers’ secondary without a five-star high school résumé under his belt.
“Every day,” said Jackson, “we’re practicing with the best defensive backs in the country.”
Even if it doesn’t always perform that way.
A third of LSU’s 2015 opponents passed for 280 yards or more. Even Florida’s lowly pass attack racked up 271 yards on the Tigers. Alabama’s Jacob Coker completed 75 percent of his passes against “DBU,” and LSU wasn’t able to get the Tide offense off the field.
Part of the problem was a defensive front that at times struggled against the run. And perhaps part of the problem was LSU not taking to new defensive coordinator Kevin Steele’s scheme.
If the latter was the case, the Tigers are going through it again this year as Steele bolted after 2015 for Auburn and LSU brought in Wisconsin’s Dave Aranda to replace him.
“It’s the same thing, just a different scheme,” Toliver shrugged. “I really feel like we’re going to improve. It’s going to be a better year.”
Why would Toliver say that?
This is, after all, the third defensive coordinator the group has had to learn in as many years. And they need to prove they can create turnovers better than a year ago. And they need to prove they can get offenses off the field more efficiently on third down.
Yet, to a man, LSU’s DBs have the belief that it will again be a dominant secondary.
Why is that? Jackson, the fastest man in college football, says it best.
“The talent,” he says, “speaks for itself.”
