Joe Burrow: LSU's Toughest Renaissance Man and Maybe Savior at QB

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Joe Burrow remembers tucking a stool into his locker and then collapsing onto the floor. He’d never passed out before so this was all new. His body was devoid of nutrition after one of the longest games in college football history, LSU’s seven-overtime, five-hour marathon loss at Texas A&M in which Burrow attempted 38 passes and ran 29 times. One minute, he lay on the visiting locker room floor. The next, he was on a table with an IV in his arm and trainers feeding him cookies and applesauce. And then he saw his parents, ushered inside by team personnel for one of the scariest sights any parent could see—their son a literal example of a human body giving out after a football game. The issue was serious enough that it delayed the team from departing Kyle Field that night, trainers tending to the Tigers’ star quarterback before finally helping him to the bus. “To see somebody put that kind of effort, desire and passion in a game,” longtime head LSU trainer Jack Marucci says, “it’s probably one of the first times I’ve seen anyone get into that kind of state of fatigue.”

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He is, after all, heralded as the tough guy with gobs of grit, a player who seeks collisions and refuses to slide, who as a backup quarterback at Ohio State begged Urban Meyer to play on the kickoff team. What’s more Joe Burrow than collapsing onto the locker room floor after a football game? “He literally,” LSU coach Ed Orgeron says, “left it all on the field”—almost too much of it.

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He pokes fun at himself about his cooking, and everything else, part of a personality that warmed LSU players to him so quickly. It’s part of why Ohio State fans and players openly root for him still. Former OSU quarterback J.T. Barrett, now living 90 minutes south of Baton Rouge as a member of the New Orleans Saints, visited Burrow earlier this summer and plans to attend a few LSU games. Burrow himself returned to Ohio State to watch the Buckeyes spring game. Last fall, LSU’s last-second field goal to beat Auburn played in real time on a jumbotron at the site of Ohio State’s game against TCU in Arlington, Texas. Roars from OSU fans engulfed AT&T Stadium as the kick split the uprights, and there was Joe, shown on the screen with his hands in the air. That was when he began to feel comfortable at LSU, he says, a feeling surely helped by his late-game play. He connected with Derrick Dillon for a 71-yard touchdown with 8 minutes left, and then kept the Tigers alive with a dart to receiver Stephen Sullivan on fourth-and-7 with less than three minutes left, a drive that ended with Cole Tracy’s game-winning, 42-yard boot. He entered the huddle ahead of that fourth-down play, looked at his teammates and, smiling cheek to check, said, “Hey guys. What’s up?” That’s just Joe, LSU center Lloyd Cushenberry says—cool, calm, disarming Joe.

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“That’s who we’re building around.” Marucci was there for the Texas A&M postgame fiasco. And, no, we’re not talking about the fisticuffs. In the locker room, Burrow dropped to a knee and then the floor. Michael Bonnette, the school’s longtime sports information director, saw it all. “I ran to get Jack (Marucci),” Bonnette recalls. At that point, nearly every player had already loaded the bus. Word filtered through the rows of seats, Cushenberry says. “We were definitely worried about him, but he’s tough.” Ah, that word again. He is tough, but he’s so much more. He’s Joe Burrow, maybe the savior at quarterback for a program that badly needs one and a guy who knows a thing or two about black holes. Toward the end of his media parade through the Hyatt Regency on Monday, Joe found himself staring into a camera being asked bizarre made-for-TV questions. One of them: What’s the last topic you searched on Google. “Oh Gosh,” Joe says, slipping his phone from his pocket and searching its browser history. He looked up and provided the questioner with the answer: “Superluminal time travel.”

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