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UncleEarl Hall Of Fame

UncleEarl

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1 hour ago, membengal said:

Oh yeah, and Marino. He was magnificent obviously, and MNF loved to have the Dolphins on. Marino was always a show. But...Montana was still better. 

Montana had a defense.  All great QBs.  Montana was awesome, but had incredible weapons, like Burrow.   Hope Burrow has the same level of success. 

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Jason Hall Of Fame

Jason

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On 1/17/2022 at 12:05 PM, UncleEarl said:

Montana had a defense.  All great QBs.  Montana was awesome, but had incredible weapons, like Burrow.   Hope Burrow has the same level of success. 

Just imagine Burrow could do with an O-line like 2015, or 2005, or 1988. 

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Cricket Hall Of Fame

Cricket

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25 minutes ago, Jungletiger said:

 


Hey, in the last couple of days, I replied to a post in one of these threads with, “The Burrow Effect”.

 

Glad to see it make it to Wikipedia (even if it MAY have been conceived in another brain). 
 

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membengal Hall Of Fame

membengal

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The fight, the blindside block, the players-only meeting: Six moments that define the essence of Joe Burrow

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by Bruce Feldman

 

As we’ve learned time and time and time again, there is no such thing as a “Can’t Miss” NFL Draft prospect, especially when it comes to quarterbacks. But the closest I’ve seen in two decades-plus covering college football was Joe Burrow. There certainly have been guys with bigger arms, more athleticism and more size, and plenty more who entered the NFL into more favorable situations — winning organizations, more proven head coaches, more talented offensive lines. Despite that, I was still betting on Burrow to change the Bengals.

For those around LSU during his time there, there was just too much evidence of just how special Burrow was to doubt him. After LSU won the national title, I spent most of the following offseason working on Ed Orgeron’s book, “Flip The Script.” I’d spent the last month of the 2019 season with the Tigers and had a front-row seat for their meetings and practices and had a fascinating perspective of what made Burrow such a transformational player.

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.

 

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.

 

2. The Conditioning Test
A rite of passage for every LSU team of the past two decades, one of the common links among the three Tiger national title teams coached by Nick Saban, Les Miles and Orgeron, was strength coach Tommy Moffitt’s team conditioning test the first Tuesday in June after the return from break. The players must do 16 90-yard shuttle runs with a one-minute break between each. Receivers and backs must do each run in under 15 seconds. Quarterbacks, tight ends, fullbacks and linebackers must do them all in under 17 seconds; linemen must be under 19 seconds. Then, they run 16 110-yard sprints. Same time limits. If they fail to pass, they have to do it every Friday until they pass.

In 2018, after he announced his transfer to LSU, Burrow arrived a week earlier in Baton Rouge than expected. While his new teammates were still on summer vacation, he was going through the workout with Moffitt.

“My first impression is going to be important,” he told Moffitt. “I don’t want to be like another freshman or newcomer.”

He wasn’t. Burrow finished first on every run they had.

 

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.”

 

4. The Fight
During Burrow’s first season at LSU, its defense dominated in fall camp. It’s pretty much how things always went there, regardless of who was under center. White, the Tigers’ star linebacker, was trash-talking seemingly the whole time.

“Yeah, that play don’t work!”

He said that repeatedly throughout a practice. After maybe the third time, he finally got a reaction.

“Hey, Devin, shut up,” Burrow yelled back, “or else I’m going to come over there and beat the fuck out of you!”

Previous LSU quarterbacks had never really barked back. And Burrow hadn’t even won the starting job yet.

“Joe’s not a rah-rah guy. He’s not going to give a speech,” Munoz said. “He doesn’t talk shit. He has so much inner strength. I think that’s what Devin White wanted. He was wanting someone to respond and challenge him. Our team rallied around it, and I think it had a snowball effect.

“A week later, Joe had a great scrimmage. We found out that was Joe. When bad things happen, he plays better because of it.”

 

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 shit 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.

 

6. The Blindside Block
At the end of Burrow’s debut season at LSU, the Tigers were playing undefeated UCF — a team riding a 25-game winning streak — in the Fiesta Bowl. LSU trailed 7-3 and was driving deep into Knights territory. Burrow threw an out route toward the UCF sideline. His receiver slipped and went down. UCF’s defensive back picked off the pass and raced up the sideline. Burrow hustled over to try to make the tackle but got crushed on a blindside block by a defensive lineman on what became a 93-yard pick-6 to give UCF a 14-3 lead and a ton of momentum.

 

Near the LSU sideline, Orgeron was arguing for a targeting call. He noticed Burrow walking past him with blood under his chin.

“Get Myles ready!” The coach yelled for Brennan, the backup, to begin loosening up to step in.

“Fuck that!” Burrow shot back. Not only did Burrow stay in the game but also he led LSU to touchdowns on the next three drives to give the Tigers a 24-14 lead and spark the comeback victory.

 

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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