The B12 (XII) Forum, home of the 'Front Porch, y'all' at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I know we don't talk about football here.  Especially in the off-season.  I just can't litter on the B1G board too much.  

utee had asked a while back about personnel for the upcoming UT @ LSU game.  I like to hedge and wait to see what happens for sure, but it's panned out about like I expected.  Here's some info, and you Horns keeping track, give me some updates too if you don't mind.  I looked into it at the start of the season, but I've forgotten a lot of it by now.  Also by now you'll know for sure who will be here and who won't.

So, LSU.....

Offense:  most obvious thing is Burrow is out, of course.  That leaves senior Sam Ehlinger vs. Jr. and first-year starter Myles Brennan.  We know what Sam can do, and he's been doing it for a long time.  Brennan has looked good in junk time, but it was garbage time, and he still was seldom allowed to do too much.  Also noticing now on rewatches just how subbed the whole team really was when he was in.  Not much footage of him working with the 1's.  Unknown quantity....not going to return LSU to the dark ages, but won't be anywhere close to his predecessor either.  Big advantage Texas, there.  

WRs are going to be really, really good again.  Only lose one guy.  One guy in particular has looked primed to do great there, just couldn't get in front of the departed guy.  Production will dip because of other factors, but this unit will be very, very hard to deal with again.

Primary TE left.  Was a pretty good weapon.  Newcomers are overall more talented, by a good bit, but Moss' experience shouldn't be discounted.  Probably a net loss, at least as early as the UT game.  

Tailback:  Primary guy left.  A really good versatile weapon who fit LSU's offense well.  All the guys behind him are better pure runners, but they lack his experience and likely won't come out of the gate doing the non-ball-carrier stuff well that made him so good in this offense.  Vision, blocking ability, probably pass catching, someone will have to emerge over time.  I'd really love this unit in LSU's old ground'n'pound days.  In this version of the spread, losing the main TB is going to be a loss, I think.  

O-line:  mixed bag.  Losing 4 out of 5 starters.  Looking at the depth chart for next year, I was surprised how many of these guys have starts and how much they have played.  Not freaking out as much as I normally would with that much changeover.  One guy was a great starter in 2017, missed 2018 suspended, and played a lot in 2019 but was not technically a starter, so I have a more confidence in that RG spot than I normally would a "new starter."  He was 2017's best OL.  The real keys are going to be, can the guard moving to C (probably) do well there, and how long does it take the LG to grow up there?  This should not be a bad line, but with OLs I'm a big believer in cumulative starts as a unit, and while there's experience here, there's not enough of these 5 guys, starting these positions, together, to project a strength here.  Best we can hope for is it's not a major weakness.  

Defense:  Not changing too much on the front and back ends.  Going to be mostly the same linemen, meaning they should be tough against the run again, not the best pass rushers, but big space eaters that let LBs do their thing.  We don't know who the new DC is yet, and if we'll still be running a 3-4 next year.  Depending on scheme and what's asked of them, this is up in the air.  As is, in the scheme LSU has been using, this is a trustworthy line.  

Same for DBs.  This is going to be a very good unit again.  Biggest concern is the nickel corner, as in, which guy shows up?  He did very well in 2018 and down the stretch of 2019.  He was an active liability for the first half of 2019.  Nadir was probably when Devin Duvernay beat him like he stole his lunch money.  Srsly, the kid should file charges for what Duvernay did to him.  Struggled on through the Florida game, and then poof, the 2018 version was back.  

LBs, this one hurts.  Departures gutted LSU here.  Lot of numbers, and lots of talent, but experience is going to be pretty thin.  The guys who have played have either done so mostly in junk time, or with a lot of the older guys around telling them what to do.  I would expect some noticeable dropoff here.  

Experience usually trumps talent in the early goings for me.  I typically ding teams which rely on talent but lack a lot of experience.  It's a big part of why I picked LSU last year and why I'm picking Texas this year.  Yall feel free to update me, but UT should be getting most of its defense back, I thought.  There's a lot of talent there, and that's a bad combo for a new QB.  LSU is going to be good, but there will be chinks in the armor on both sides, and the QB edge is a decisive advantage for the Longhorns.  

Now you know everything I know.  Back to the beer thread.  

To me, the elephant leaving the room for next season's game is obviously Joe Burrow. In my excitement leading up to this year's game (last year's game? what's correct?), I was confident that a player with Burrow's track record couldn't simply flip a switch and become the dime dropping passing talent that have given the Big 12 fits for a decades.

Of course, he did just that. At the time the Texas defense wasn't an injury plagued train wreck. The coverages were largely intact. Joe recognized them, locked in, and beat them with inch-perfect passing. That wasn't the only team he'd victimize with that skill. He deserves all the hardware and honors he's won.

Will 2020 be LSU's McCoy->Gilbert moment? The major factor there is Mack panicking and deciding his team needed to morph into Alabama in one offseason. How big of an influence was Joe Brady?

Can Texas finally have more than 1 TE ready to play?

Can I just go take a nap until late July?

Good point about the coordinators.  Three of the 4 coordinators in that contest will be new, and a piece of the 4th, in a way.  

About Joe Brady, so he was not the OC, but the offense they installed was definitely much of his doing.  He was also in the small group responsible for game planning on a weekly basis.  OTOH, he did not call the plays as a lot of folks seem to think.  Ensminger was/is still the OC in every meaningful way.  I think it will say a lot, who LSU hires to replace Brady's spot.  If they hire a guy who has a background involving a pro-style spread, that tells me they plan on keeping the same system, which I think Orgeron would like to do.  Even if they don't, it's possible Ensminger absorbed it just fine and will keep it mostly intact.  Actually I always liked Ensminger as a playcaller anyway....just his old offense made you think the game had passed him by, some.  I guess in short, Brady's loss likely isn't the end of the world, but it probably shouldn't be understated either.  

Tim Beck, I'm glad to see the end of that guy.  He somehow actually made Ehlinger worse throughout the season.  I know Colin Johnson staying hurt a lot didn't help, but you don't generally see an offense go in reverse through a season like that.  

I thought Orlando would do a great job at Texas.  Guess not.  Aranda will be missed for sure.  Not many names out there I like better than him, so it's hard to imagine an upgrade there.  

I don't look for a McCoy-to-Gilbert moment.  Brennan or whoever isn't going to reach the heights we just saw, but probably nobody at LSU ever will.  They can still be good enough to be in the running to upend Alabama every now and then and snag a conference title and playoff berth along with it.  IMO there was a lot of rot on the Texas roster, possibly within the program, that Colt and Shipley and a few others were glossing over.  I recall some questionable spots on that team that weren't immediately obvious.  utee was just telling me the other day the O-line was weak.  I won't pretend I saw 2010 coming, but there were some worrisome signs that some things had gone downhill and stellar QB play was hiding them.  

LSU's moment was the 2013 draft, that saw a record breaking slew of talent leave the team (mainly defensive guys).  They had the talent to field a very good offense the next season, but the 2013 defense really exposed how much recruiting had dropped off, and it never recovered in the Miles era.  The 2020 team has a lot more bodies to fill the vacated spots than 2013 did, and more highly rated bodies.  Experience is going to cost them some games, but I don't think they'll fall off a ledge like we've seen before.  In retrospect the warning signs were there for LSU in 2012 like they were for Texas in 2009.  I try to look for the same things and I don't think that's happening.  That's not to say they won't still lose 3 games, or maybe more depending on what happens at QB.

That's the thing about this offense.  For a long time LSU was mostly immune to subpar QB play.  Didn't matter, the offense was never built on that one guy.  This team was, and this scheme is.  You don't have to have Burrow, but you have to have that guy that makes it go.  Just so hard to project with a guy who's not really played any meaningful snaps.  That's why I have to give such a big advantage to a team with Ehlinger.  He's proven, and he's good.   

I'm excited about Yurcich because I think, even though his vision aligns with Herman's about the type of power RPO offense Texas wants, he's savvy enough to create a scheme based on talent on-hand. The utter failure of the Texas offense to adapt to the loss of the aforementioned Brewer was inexcusable for a college coach.

I think Orlando got a bit too much blame when an outrageous amount of secondary injuries occurred. However, whenever I get to pondering this, I remember Joseph Ossai spun down onto the DL and absolutely vapor locking Utah's offense. With this sample of one, I can conclude that replacing him wasn't that bad of an idea. The Big 12 is working to abandon the 2000's era wide open passing, and Chis Ash has experience in stopping the next evolution.

I gotta slow down. I've got 8 months to pontificate on college football without substance! I can't waste it all here!

Orlando's complete wasting of a talent like Ossai's for the entire 2019 season was perplexing, shocking, and plenty reason enough to shitcan his ass.  Good riddance.

Burrow had by far the best QB season I have ever seen, including that of VY.  Without him, I think LSU is a 9-3 team, or even 8-4.  Any other losses are typical, and LSU would reload and restock and be fine.

I think LSU will need to fall back on their D next year.

Disagree with you there for sure.  VY is the greatest college football player I've ever seen play the game. On balance their seasons were reasonably close, but I believe VY's win over 2005 USC was a much greater accomplishment than LSU's win over what I consider to be a tepid Clemson team, and that puts VY over the top.  I completely expected and predicted LSU's 2-TD win and, had they awoken a little earlier, that game would have been completely out of hand.

Burrow had a fantastic season though, no doubt.  I guess time will tell how LSU does without him in 2020.

many will factor in the NFL careers of Burrow and Young to make their case in that debate, but they are obviously misguided

true die-hard college football fans

by that definition, it's a small elite group