Nine schools are bringing quarterbacks to SEC Media Days this year and they are all important, but what LSU is wanting to do with Joe Burrow this year may make him one of more critical ones.
“This is Joe’s type of offense,” Tigers coach Ed Orgeron said after saying they have installed a spread offense.
You can be excused if you take a skeptical view. A lot of folks are right there with you. We’ve heard it before, right?
“This style of offense is the offense I have been doing since I was 14 or 15,” Burrow said. “No huddle, get the ball out fast. So that is kind of what I was comfortable with, and I had to get comfortable doing the other style of offense last year.”
We lost count of how many times Les Miles promised to open up the offense and have the quarterback do more things, other than to recruit some pretty good dual-threat quarterbacks, then force them into a traditional pro-style offense.
This time, Orgeron claims he means it.
“It’s not a threat, I promise you that” he said. “We are going to run the spread offense. It’s in … it’s in the playbook.”
To be honest, just about everybody has to do that these days or risk losing in the recruiting game. Ask Bret Bielema how falling on your face there catches up to you with the fan base unless you’re winning double-digit games every year.
Shoot, even Jim Harbaugh has gone to it with Michigan and that may be more shocking than LSU spreading it out.
Maybe the biggest key is we’ll apparently see Burrow turned loose more this year because backup Myles Brennan is healthy this year. He wasn’t last year and Orgeron didn’t want to get Burrow hurt.
“We could not run Joe as much as we wanted to last year,” he said. “Myles Brennan was hurt … now Myles Brennan is healthy. We’re going to do a lot more running with joe this year.”
While Orgeron would probably like to see Burrow do something other than try to run over people, though.
“If we let him, he would run into a brick wall,” he said of Burrow’s running style. “He has a linebacker mentality.
And it doesn’t sound like Burrow is changing.
“If you slide, more people get hurt than when they don’t,” was Burrows. “If you don’t slide, you will be really sore, but I don’t think you are going to get really hurt. You see when people slide, and someone will dive into their ankle or twist their ankle or twist their knee so that’s part of it.”
But there’s another solution for him.
“You also want to be smart and get out of bounds if there is a 250-pound linebacker chasing you down who is faster, stronger, and bigger than you, so yeah I will get out of bound in that situation,” Burrow said.
Which may be good news for Orgeron and LSU fans.
That simply proves he’s not insane.
