When Burrow tried to fight Stevens at practice, leading to all-out team brawl

More details have emerged on the Burrow-Stevens fight and ensuing offense-vs.-defense brawl last year. Joe gained a lot of respect from the team for not backing down. Just another example of his greatness and how he won everyone over. This scrap helped bring the team together. Good stuff (per The Athletic).

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In a scrimmage – Burrow and the offense were torching the defense. It was a bloodbath, one of those 400-yard Burrow days that signified to the team that this offense was about to shock the world. The defense didn’t love this. So JaCoby Stevens came off the edge on a red zone blitz and smoked Burrow to the ground. One person remembers Burrow’s helmet even coming off, and Burrow instantly popped up and charged at Stevens, grabbing his face mask. All hell broke loose, an all-out offense-versus-defense fight on the Ponderosa.

(Stevens refutes some of the details, tweeting Wednesday that he did not intentionally wrap up and tackle Burrow and that Burrow did not grab his face mask. Stevens did add, however, that he has “much earned respect” for Burrow, someone he called the “greatest college football player of all time.”)

“Tory Carter comes in like a heat-seeking missile and takes somebody out, I can’t remember who,” one LSU staffer said. The entire team was involved. Outside linebacker K’Lavon Chaisson — who was still not practicing because of a torn ACL from the previous fall — even joined in and started fighting. The whole offensive line joined in. Well, except one member. “Adrian Magee was too tired,” a player said. “You could see in film when the fight was going on, he was standing grabbing water.”

Everybody has a different story of how Burrow won over each member of the team. For most players, it was a moment in a game or the way he worked. Many, thought, pointed to this brawl. “Joe didn’t back down, and JaCoby, I think, respected him after that,” another person there said. Before the team could come together, before the world even saw this record-breaking offense, LSU had to go at each other first.

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