Running out of retention options
Scooter Hobbs
As ready as everybody in every walk of life seems to be to throw 2020 in the dumpster fire and just move on, LSU football isn’t looking ahead to 2021.
It has just sort of worked out that way.
By any way you want to measure it, the Tigers’ season has been a Category 5 disaster — historically awful for a defending national champion.
It probably doesn’t help to have freshmen here, there and everywhere, at least one of whom thought it was cool to casually flick the ball to the ground a good yard and a half shy of his touchdown.
“Freshman mistake,” head coach Ed Orgeron called it.
“Yeah, they’re all playing,” he said of the youth movement and having 19 players make their first college starts.
“It’s not like we’re saving for the future,” Orgeron said. “It’s what we have. Most of the players are playing for 2020. It just so happens most of them are young players.”
Bottom line: LSU had four starters for the Alabama catastrophe who were part of the lovefest in last year’s national championship game.
The scant few who didn’t get scarfed up in last year’s NFL draft have been opting out left and right since August.
That’s their right. Anybody who didn’t feel comfortable performing football in the middle of a pandemic shouldn’t be pressured into it.
But somehow you get the feeling most of them were not really COVID-related concerns, just a convenient excuse.
The Tigers surely weren’t concerned about social distancing when a good bunch of them went to that infamous, off-campus Halloween party the night after Auburn had drilled them that afternoon.
The whole thing has left Orgeron scrambling in damage-control mode. One thing after another.
So imagine him getting to work Monday, fresh off getting taken to the woodshed by Alabama, when a secretary buzzed in.
“Arik Gilbert is here to see you.”
It wasn’t good news. It rarely is these days.
But in a season full of what-can-go-wrong-next? moments, this one sent shock waves through the football building and the fandom.
Gilbert, a tight end who can also play wide receiver — where the Tigers have had two potential All-Americans opt out since August — is one of those freshmen. He’s the pride of last year’s recruiting class and he’s been living up to the hype. He certainly wasn’t complaining about lack of playing time — he was an instant starter, now the team’s leading receiver (with Terrace Marshall having opted out) and Orgeron has publicly complained that they’re not getting him the ball enough.
The first reports said Gilbert, was “homesick” for Marietta, Georgia. On a radio show Tuesday morning Orgeron confirmed Gilbert was considering leaving — he used the term “opting out” for what seems more like a garden-variety transfer — and that Gilbert said “his body hurt.”
Missing the hometown. A bit sore eight games into a debut whirl around the SEC. What’s the difference?
“If he opts out, we would definitely take him back,” Orgeron said.
Forget the virus and all those pesky tests always threatening to cancel another game. At this rate the Tigers may have trouble finding enough players who even want to finish the season.
And, believe it or not, LSU is talking about going to a bowl — it’s 2020 and anybody is fair game, no matter the record.
LSU has always lost more than its share of juniors to the draft. When you start having trouble getting those who aren’t yet eligible for the NFL to stick around, it is a pure, stir-fried 2020 dilemma at its best.
Especially, it seems, at LSU, where Orgeron now has to have weekly meetings on “roster management.”
It certainly doesn’t sound like the happiest of locker rooms.
Orgeron insisted the mood and morale of the team is fine. “Look at the way they fought the whole game (against Alabama).”
OK, they did play hard. Not much better than in the first act of this horror movie in the season opener. But harder. Those who opted to play did so with enough gusto.
“If we were an 8-0 team, everything would be different,” transfer senior linebacker Jabril Cox said Tuesday. “Coach has done a good job of telling us to keep our heads up.”
In his next breath, Cox said:
“We’re all still trying to put good tape on film. A lot of us are trying to reach the next level.”
Maybe that’s not exactly going to war for the Ol’ War Skul.
But it’s the current reality at the self-styled NFLSU.
Orgeron is already gearing up to change their minds.
“Doing it, I promise, on a daily basis,” he said. “Some are dead set on going. Some are considering coming back.”
His message, he said, is “Development. Stay another year. Some guys stay another year and make $10 million by getting drafted higher.”
This year you haven’t seen many juniors whose performances scream “NFL ready” anyway.
But that hasn’t stopped them before.
l
Scooter Hobbs covers LSU
athletics. Email him at
shobbs@americanpress.com
Michael Woods / Associated Press