The Air Raid offense re-entered the Southeastern Conference with a bang last year when LSU fell 44-34 at the hands of graduate transfer quarterback KJ Costello and his 623 passing yards.
LSU’s secondary had some major issues within it, also feeling the temporary loss of star cornerback Derek Stingley Jr. The playing field was pretty level with Mississippi State and LSU nearly tied for the youngest team in the conference.
Heading into the 2021 season, which is still months away, things will be much of the same — but different.
The Bulldogs and Tigers are very much still younger teams in the SEC, and both will gain the advantage of finally having a full offseason to work with.
Based on spring practices and the spring game itself, LSU looks much improved on defense and the secondary may be the unit that has made the most strides.
At the same token, the Air Raid is based on repetition and execution. We watched head coach Mike Leach’s team begin to find itself, ending the season with a win and coming up close on some tough opponents even in its losses down the stretch.
With a full spring and players returning from last year who were in the system, the offense based on doing things over and over again has the chance to make a statement in 2021.
Obviously, it’s only the spring and we’ll learn more in the fall, but Leach seemed confident in the talent level and overall preparedness of the team when I asked him about it Sunday.
“Definitely ahead of last year,” he said. “I think we’re still a work in progress. We didn’t get to have spring last year. We’re still a very young team, so we’re improving quickly, but we have a long ways to go, but we’ve got a lot of enthusiasm, I think.”
Going through practices this offseason, the results were satisfactory overall, but there’s still work to be done.
“As far as having top-to-bottom, pretty good practices, I thought we did,” Leach said. “I’ve never had a spring where I thought it was perfect, but I thought we definitely had nine really good practices. We had one that was probably average, maybe even a little above average. We had one that I would actually say was below-average.”
Spring is a good time for teams to spot their issues and get a solid evaluation of where they are moving forward, but at the end of the day, a spring game is just that — a spring game.
“Spring games, they’re kind of just distractions to the point where some guys just give up on what they’re doing and they’ll just go through the motions,” Leach said. “We haven’t given up on doing them, but it wasn’t as good of work as our other two scrimmages.
“A lot of teams, they give up and go out there and just have sort of a fake practice. They go for 45 minutes and sort of just lay around out there. We didn’t do that, but we split the teams in half and that may have made it sloppy. You know it’s going to make it sloppy when you do it but it makes it competitive at the same time. You have guys out there who aren’t used to playing alongside one another. I thought it was valued work, but I thought we could have gotten more out of it.”
There’s never really one guy who is a standout in his own right within the Air Raid because it’s not based around giving or throwing the ball to a single playmaker. Rather, it’s based on distributing the ball amongst targets.
There are many talented players within the team Leach believes are flying under the radar — though it’s still early to tell just how far they’ll go this year.
“I actually think a bunch of them are,” Leach said. “It’s difficult to say because we’re still kind of going in spurts as people develop their skills and prove what they can do. That’s the thing, a young guy one day can’t do something and the next day he gets better at it. But then there’s also another learning curve of being able to do it the majority of the time.”
As for the quarterback position, the Bulldogs have seven of them on campus and Sawyer Robertson hasn’t arrived yet. Leach describes the competition as “wide open” though Will Rogers and Jack Abraham are unsurprisingly leading the way at this point.
“I think Will (Rogers) and Jack (Abraham) are at the top, but I also think that Chance (Lovertich) and Daniel (Greek) really showed some good things,” Leach said.
Leach has described Mississippi State as a work in progress on several occasions, but things are coming along and there’s a high sense of optimism.
“I think we’ve improved across the offensive line, but I think we’ve got to get better,” Leach said.
I think our quarterbacks have got to get better. In a word, everywhere, we’ve got to get better. I think generally speaking, though, it’s instrumentally. I don’t think there’s a huge bust out there, I just think that we have to everywhere and I think it’s developing.
In terms of reaching an ideal within the offense as the whole, that doesn’t exist for Leach. There is always room for more improvement and always a chance to rep a play another time.
“I’ve never had an offense that’s where I want it to be,” Leach said. “Football is not really a ‘where you want it to be’ deal. There’s nothing more to do if it’s where you want it to be. After Jerry Rice won the Super Bowl and went to the Pro Bowl and all of that, he was out there working and running like crazy. So if he needs to work, I think everybody does.”