Scooter Hobbs column: Daniels doesn’t owe LSU anything
Published 12:04 pm Wednesday, December 20, 2023
LSU will have 91 percent of its starting offensive players on hand against Wisconsin for the ReliaQuest Bowl in Tampa.
In the Opt-Out Age we live in, that’s the good news.
The Tigers, however, will be missing 75 percent of their actual offense and their only Heisman Trophy winner.
It wasn’t really a surprise that Jayden Daniels opted out.
It will be hard not to notice his absence.
The LSU quarterback is not skipping the bowl altogether. Head coach Brian Kelly said Monday that Daniels will be in Tampa on the sidelines cheering on his teammates come Jan. 1. He’ll presumably get the standard-issue player-participation swag bag while taking a break from his preparations for the NFL draft.
It would be a nice gesture — no hard feelings — if the Tigers sent him out to midfield for the pregame coin toss.
It’d be much better, of course, if he was out there doing Jayden Daniels things, like when his 3,812 passing yards and 1,134 rushing yards led the Tigers in both and accounted for three-quarters of their total yards.
But it goes without saying that Daniels need not apologize to anybody. He certainly doesn’t owe LSU anything.
The idle speculation was that LSU would not even have been bowl eligible without Daniels’ season-long derring-do.
Now the Tigers get to see if they can win a bowl game without him.
That’s not so bad.
If you treat the players as actors and try to explain to them “What’s my motive?” for Tampa, about the best you can come up with is the quest for a 10-win season. It’s a nice round number, but a bit of a reach, probably not the sort of the thing a team busts down the locker room doors to get a shot at.
But really, nothing LSU does in this bowl game is going to really change the narrative of this season as one of greatest, most exciting individual performances ever, with one dynamic Tiger spending the year desperately trying, with one jaw-dropper after another, darting this way and dodging this and that, mostly throwing long darts, to stay one step ahead of an historically bad defense.
So it’s not the worst thing, really, that the bowl game is more of a preview for next season than the capper for this year.
It’s a sneak peak at life without That Kid Jayden.
Hard to remember now — not after the Heisman festivities in New York — but early in the season (after a loss, of course) there was a good ration of the fan base
squawking and clamoring to see backup Garrett Nussmeier get a shot over Daniels.
You didn’t hear a peep from them late in the season. But now is the time. And if this upcoming game is seen as an audition for Nussmeier, it should be a fair assessment.
Nussmeier will have all the same weapons at his disposal that Daniels had, mainly the entire offensive line and star receivers Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas. Both prime targets will stick around for the bowl before heading to the NFL. As likely first-rounders, they’d have been good candidates to opt for the opt-out.
But “Jayden’s the only guy that’s not playing in the game,” Kelly said. “We’re bringing everybody that was with us in the last game of the season. Nobody else has said anything.”
Presumably he means starters, as LSU has a handful of backups already in the transfer portal. But they did get an opt-back when starting defensive back Sage Ryan changed his mind and is back on the team after saying last week that he was portal bound.
So, basically it’s heir apparent Nussmeier’s next move.
Probably his job to win or lose for next year.
Nussmeier, who played high school in the Dallas area but lists his home town as his birthplace of Lake Charles, is no stranger to LSU fans.
LSU’s adventurous defense kept Daniels on the field (and Nussmeier holding a clipboard) longer than you’d think this season. The backup is probably best known for an encouraging second half after Daniels was injured in last year’s SEC Championship game. He completed 15 of 29 for 294 yards, including touchdown passes of 33 and 34 yards.
Now it’s his turn, his offense.
Kelly and LSU went portal hunting to add a quarterback to the roster when Vanderbilt’s A.J. Swann recently committed to the Tigers. Swann showed enough promise at Vandy to suggest that the quarterback race for next season with Nussmeier isn’t quite as cut and dry as it might appear on paper.
But Nussmeier will get first crack under live, real-time conditions against a really good defense.
Daniels will be in his corner. Certainly it will be a better judge than a silly spring game.
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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress. com
