The QB position is different from OL, RBs, LBs. He is the face of the team. Coach can rotate linemen, DBs, Wrs, and it doesn't get a lot of attention. Change the QB, and it becomes a headline. I can't remember a time in the past where Miles benched a starter for the backup aka Brady/Bledsoe. JL was made starter when JJ was suspended and injured but was sent back to bench when JJ returned. JL had a hard time sniffing the field after that no matter how JJ struggled. Miles will not bench AJ for Harris. His player loyalty won't allow him to. I hope I'm wrong, but we just put all our marbles with AJ as long as he is a tiger. I hope AJ the best because his success means success for my beloved Tigers and that is ultimately the thing that matters, but it saddens me that it is all or nothing. I'd be comfortable with AJ if I thought BH had a legitimate opportunity to earn the starting job at some point but I don't. That's all, I just want him to get his shot. Hopefully I'm wrong but precedence tells me I'm right. The 3rd quarter would have been a good time to give Harris a series. We were mainly running the ball anyway. The O was struggling, out of sync. Jennings was average. Perhaps Harris would have been better than average. This isn't baseball. Jennings could be put back in. It's not like AJ is a redshirt senior as Tyler Russell was when Dak Prescott was a RS freshman. We don't know if Harris will live up to his potential and I'm afraid we'll never know. I've posted the stats for both QBs. Harris has better stats. At the end of fall camp, the coaches said the QBs were equal. It's not like AJ beat out Harris as some seem to suggest, it's that the coaches had to go with one so they picked AJ probably because he had been in the system for a year. I'm fine with that. But Harris' performance against MSU and NMSU and the fan outcry forced CLMs hand and made him start Harris against Auburn. Harris had a bad performance (so did AJ in relief) and that was all the excuse CLM needed to put him on the bench. He has played maybe two minutes of mop up duty and thrown one pass since. He is on the bench for good. Tell me I'm wrong.
No, he can't! Don't you remember the broken plays when Harris turned one way and the backs went the other? It even happened during the MSST come back. He is raw and not ready. We could not afford that in the FL or OM games and unless he progresses and proves it in practice, he may sit the bench for the rest of the year when the game is on the line. If the coaches were impressed by his ability to focus in the UK game and get the plays right, maybe they will put in a package for him for the Bama game. But I doubt it.
Do you have a script or something? How do you know these things? Harris was not recruited to sit on the bench for four years, nor was he recruited to be anointed as the starter when he doesn't know the playbook. Give it some time. We need a confident quarterback that is not worried about being pulled after every bad play. Jennings needs to start and play like a starter right now. Harris needs to learn his job and be ready to go in if Jennings goes down or if Jennings has a really bad night, which will happen in some game soon. That is the time for Harris to show his stuff and he had better be more prepared then and I think he will. If Harris has the stuff he will take the job away from Jennings by better play. He hasn't done it yet. We need him to do that when the time is right. I think the competition is good for both of these quarterbacks.
People are getting too hung up on the Jennings or Harris merry go round when it's clear that neither is ready to play SEC football. The real question is why do we once again find ourselves in this position and how do you break the cycle of one season of quality QB play every 5 or more years? Also fans seem to feel the need to prop up one or the other QB as a viable option when in reality neither one should be on the field. How sad is it that the high bar for LSU QB's these days is that he didn't lose the game for us therefore his play was acceptable? It appears to me that Jennings is our best option to win now and I support him, however that doesn't mean I have to sugar coat his performance in games. His completion to int ratio was 4:1, not TD to int but COMPLETIONS to int 4:1 !!!!!!! That's abysmal!!!!! I do agree that in some aspects he is improving and that in order to hide his inability to throw the gameplan protects him, but don't come here and say his performance was anything but pitiful or you lose all credibility. I'm very happy with an incredible win that the team earned with an anchor around it's neck, but the QB play is what it is and it ain't pretty.
Shit happens, I suppose. Not many schools manage to have a top QB each and every year. Perilloux might have been a great one, but he thought hanging out with slackers was more important than excelling in football. Zach Lee might have been a great one, but he couldn't turn down a million dollars from pro baseball. Gunner Kiel might have been a great one, but he didn't have the chest for it. Les has had some good ones get away. We must play the quarterbacks we have and hope they get better and I think they will. How much better, only time will tell.
I agree, but I do find it disturbing that a significant number of much lesser programs seem to have much less trouble fielding adequate QB's.
A game manager would be a significant step up from what we normally see on the field year after year.
And, yet, we still win at a higher percentage in the toughest division outside of the NFL than almost all of those teams. We do consistently have a deficiency at QB, which is annoying. However, we tend to have few deficiencies elsewhere. A trade off, I suppose.
