I told
@eltigrerex after 2013 that if you'd have told me preseason that LSU would set an SEC record to become the first league team to feature a 3k passer, two 1k WRs, and a 1k tailback, I wouldn't have believed it.
2019 LSU: "Hold my beer."
This board doesn't have the traffic it used to, and no LSU fans left to celebrate with. Anybody reading this doesn't care. No worries, I have no problems with a completely self-serving post strictly to log some things that I might want to remember later (which might still be here a long time from now, with the small amount of posting that goes on here).
I doubt I'll ever enter the Greatest Team Of All Time debate, because it's so subjective. And beyond that, it's pointless to try to adjust for eras to try to make head to head comparisons. For example, would 1995 Nebraska defense have any clue what to do with an RPO? Highly doubtful. Could '71 Nebraska (or even '95 for that matter) compete with today's athletes with modern training and nutrition methods? Conversely, could 2019 LSU score so many points if the rules didn't so heavily favor offenses now? They might find out life is harder when you can be legally annihilated.
Speaking of....my Longhorn wife was busy raising kids, going to school, and working a full time job back in 2005 so she'd never seen the Rose Bowl vs. USC. I happen to have that, so a few months ago we watched it because I really thought she should see it. 2005 doesn't seem like that long ago to me, but it was crazy how much the game has changed already. If that game were played today, within the first five minutes both Texas and USC would've had multiple players ejected for targeting. You could still kill guys back then. I don't even want to see footage of Laron Landry from that time period.....he would be ejected, then arrested, then sent to Guantanamo.
Anyway, point is, claiming anything about "best teams" is a fool's errand. But I do think the discussions about Greatest
Season Of All Time are fun. I thought
Jason Kirk had a pretty level take on that in which he basically says it's still highly subjective and probably dependent on who your favorite team is, but that 2019 LSU definitely gets to throw its hat in the ring and enter the discussion now. I agree on all accounts.
This team really did set some records and hit some milestones though. Some things like awards are fairly pointless because they're popularity contests (Grant Delpit won the Thorpe lolololololol, Jeff Okudah is like "wait, what?") but are kinda cool anyway. (Also, the OL won the Joe Moore award, which....I don't even....yeah okay. I mean, this O-line wasn't bad, but they weren't great either, and if Burrow weren't so good at moving in the pocket, feeling the rush, and escaping like Houdini when he needed to, they would've easily given up an extra 2-3 sacks per game.)
All that said, they did some pretty cool things:
- 15-0
- Defeated the preseason top 4 teams
- Defeated 7 then-top 10 teams
- Defeated 7 teams in final AP Poll
- Defeated 5 of the top 8 teams in the final AP Poll
- Defeated 6 current-top 13 teams in the CFP rankings
- Won their conference championship and CFP games by a combined 79 points — vs. #4, #4, and #3
- Defeated the winners of the ACC, Big 12, SEC East, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Citrus Bowl, Alamo Bowl, and Texas Bowl
- Ended a 29-game winning streak of the previous national champion, whose QB had never lost a game in his college career
- Kept said QB from throwing a TD pass for the first time in his 30-game college career
The team consisted of:- Heisman Award winner
- Biletnikoff Award winner
- Thorpe Award winner
- Moore Award winners
- Coach of the Year Award winner
- Assistant of the Year Award winner
- PFF’s highest-graded DB
- 4 1st-Team All-Americans
- 6 1st-Team All-Conference players
- 6 2nd-Team All-Conference players
- Most points scored in the AP Poll era
- First QB ever with 60 passing TDs
- 3 receivers with 13+ TDs in a season
Some of the many stats they produced and records they broke:- Most TDs responsible for in a season
- Most passing yards in SEC history (by well over 1000 yards) and 3rd-most overall
- Most TDs responsible for in BCS/CFP title game
- Most TDs responsible for in CFP history
- 2nd-highest completion % in a season
- 8th-highest YPA in a season
- Highest passer rating in a season
- 13th-most receiving yards in a season
- 9th-most and 21st-most receiving TDs in a season
I think the thing that jumps out at me most in all that is the TD number record. I thought Colt Brennan's record might have a chance to stand for a long while to come, and that if and when somebody broke it, it would be somebody from a mid-major. Brennan did what he did in the WAC. Burrow beat that record in the SEC, against a murderer's row of defenses. You're just not supposed to be able to do that. LSU has fielded defenses in the past much more capable of getting after a QB, but other than that this unit was very good. Not the best this year and certainly not in the running for best all-time, but once they let everybody stop faking injury from the Texas game and come back towards the end of the year, they were definitely "NC quality." Once everyone came back healthy they were able to hold their last 4 opponents to 17.5 points. That's pretty good when you consider their playoff opponents averaged about 43 ppg and LSU was able to hold them to an average of 26. And 14 of that for Oklahoma was garbage time. That's good. There's an NC winner every season, and I won't pretend it's not super fun to see your team get one. But what I think will make this one special for the fans in the longer run is this team gets to be in the discussion for best season ever from here on out. Some of this stuff is unlikely to be broken until the playoffs expand. This is the team that probably nothing else in the future--even if LSU wins more NCs, which I think they can--will measure up to. This was the QB that when I'm an old fart kids will talk about their favorite QB and I'll say "He's good, but he's no Joe Burrow" and they'll roll their eyes and ask wonder why old farts always bring that up. He was an interesting watch this year. He operated with a different skillset than what you normally see from great college QBs. He played the game a bit more like a successful NFL qb, and by that I don't mean he's capable of carving up NFL defenses. I mean the skillset of a great college QB and a great NFL QB are often different, and Burrow did not necessarily play the same way other college greats like Tua, VY, Weurffel, etc. etc. etc. did. I don't mean one is better or worse, just different, and you don't usually see that. Burrow played more like I imagine how a really good NFL QB would play if they were back in college. Thing is most of those guys didn't play like that in college, because that's not how you usually succeed there. To be clear, I'm not saying Burrow is NFL QB...for all I know he'll go to the Bengals and be swallowed by that black hole and never be heard from again. I just mean he got things done differently than, say, Tua last year. Er, wait, I've just been informed he fell 0.4% short of breaking Colt McCoy's season completion% record. Nvmnd. Fire everybody. 
