re: The Legend of Joe Grows

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Whenever people talk about his toughness, the first thing I always think is “this is the guy who tried to fight Miami in the tunnel before his first game at LSU.”

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No doubt there were lots of eye-popping highlights, but much of what separates the good from the great at the position are the intangibles, and those often aren’t best illustrated by a play but rather by something behind the scenes. These are the six moments that perhaps most demonstrated not only who Joe Burrow is but also what he’s become.

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1. The Official Visit Burrow and his parents flew into Baton Rouge from Ohio. His older brother, Dan, came in from Houston. On the second day of the visit, Orgeron catered lunch (from Walk-On’s, if memory serves them correctly) in the LSU staff room, where they were doing a film session for the quarterback. In the room were Orgeron, LSU offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger, a former NFL QB who had been an offensive coordinator at four major college programs; passing game coordinator Jerry Sullivan, who had spent a quarter century coaching in the NFL; and offensive analyst Jorge Munoz, a former FCS offensive coordinator who had pulled together all of Burrow’s good plays from his mop-up duties with Ohio State and during the Buckeyes’ spring game, where he shined. Munoz married together some other Ohio State concepts with the Tigers’ offense, as well as some NFL techniques they planned to implement. The LSU staff wanted Burrow to develop a comfort zone with its offense and his fit in it, and for him to know, these guys understand me. However, once they started dissecting Burrow’s plays, his reads, what he was seeing, what he wanted to attack, they noticed an insight and a command that lit up the room. “I have never heard another college football player talk about football the way he did,” Orgeron said. “Listening to him, what we were looking for really wasn’t so much a matter of a right or wrong answer, it was more about his command of the process.” Orgeron, like everyone else in that room that day, quickly figured out Joe Burrow had the sharpest football mind of anyone there.

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3. The Team Meeting Burrow walked into a muddled QB situation at LSU. He’d make it a four-man race, competing with four-star recruits Lowell Narcisse and Myles Brennan, plus Justin McMillan, who had a lot of support inside the locker room. The Tigers staff graded everything in camp — drills, one-on-one reps, 7-on-7s as well as the team scrimmages. “We kept it all in a book,” Orgeron told me. “I figured I was going to need it.” A couple of weeks after the first scrimmage of training camp, Ensminger told all four QBs where they stood. Burrow and Brennan were the top two. Not long after, Narcisse and McMillan left the team. McMillan’s exit was a messy one, prompting the Tigers’ leadership committee to have a meeting with Orgeron, who showed them the grades of all the QBs. The leadership committee called a players-only team meeting. It lasted about 45 minutes. Inside the meeting, a lot of veteran players on the defense, including linebackers Devin White and Michael Divinity and cornerback Greedy Williams, stood up for Burrow. Burrow spoke up in the meeting too, but only after listening awhile. “I knew that a lot of people on the team were rooting for Justin,” he told me. “I think Justin was kind of in the same position that I was at Ohio State. I know a lot of people at Ohio State wouldn’t have liked someone transferring in to take my job if that had happened to me. So I addressed that and told them that whether I’m the starter or not, whoever is the starter, we’ve got to rally behind that guy because we have to win games. “I don’t know how much my words resonated with anybody, but I think after that meeting, we were a lot closer as a team.”

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5. Going Empty Joe Burrow’s first meeting with Alabama was a nightmare. Defensive lineman Quinnen Williams was unblockable. LSU slid the line to him. It tried double-teaming him. It had its best linemen, Lloyd Cushenberry and Damien Lewis, two future NFL starters, on him, and it still didn’t matter. They max-protected much of the night and Burrow still got sacked five times. LSU lost 29-0. The next morning, Orgeron told Ensminger they had to go to more of a spread offense. At the time, LSU had no empty packages. The ball wasn’t coming out fast enough. So the Tigers started to shake things up the next time out. They played Texas A&M and lost, but it was a wild game that went seven overtimes. A&M won, 74-72. It was really the first time LSU wasn’t scared to run Burrow, and with that change, it unlocked the Tigers offense. “Coach O called me in there, ‘Hey, we’re gonna run the shite out of you this game. We’re gonna put the ball in your hands. Go win us the game.’ I said, ‘Hell, yeah!’ Let’s do it,’” Burrow later told me. “I ran the ball 30 times that game. I ran for 100 yards. We ended up losing but we played well on offense. Texas A&M was the turning point, I think when people started to realize I could do it, and that our best bet was to put the ball in my hands 40 to 50 times a game. That’s when the transformation started.” Burrow never lost again in college and the Tigers were held under 35 points only once over the next 16 games.

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The next season, LSU went 15-0, beating seven top-10 teams and whupping three teams in the postseason by more than 26 points per game. Burrow won the Heisman Trophy and became the first pick in the 2020 draft. Even though he was taken by a franchise that had gone 2-14 the year before, hadn’t had a winning season in five years, and hadn’t been past the opening round of the NFL playoffs in 30 years, people inside the LSU program were convinced Joe Burrow was going to turn around that franchise. That Burrow has the Bengals playing for the AFC title in just his second year might seem remarkable even to those who’ve been around him. Then again, it only took him two years to turn LSU into a national title team.

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