BATON ROUGE, La. – You hear the word spring and immediately your mind drifts to renewal.
Fresh starts. Optimism. Sunny skies. Trees and flowers in bloom.
That is also often the case with spring football in the South, and that fits for LSU, which gets offseason drills revving Monday.
But the one dominant theme for the Tigers doesn’t quite fit into the category of renewal or a fresh start. Optimism — now that could work its way into the conversation.
That prevailing theme, of course, as has been the case for many of Les Miles’ 11 seasons, is the quarterback spot. And for the second year in a row, the quarterback at the eye of the storm is Brandon Harris.
Harris will be back for his second season as the expected starter, although transfer Danny Etling, who has starting experience at Purdue, is being hailed as the strongest competition Harris has encountered since he more or less won the job last spring by default over Anthony Jennings.
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* His physical offensive toolbox isn’t lacking. Arm strength, foot speed and now even his durability are all attributes that can be checked off.
* After 13 games as the starter last season, the notion of Harris being inexperienced is in the rear-view mirror. He has stepped on the field as the man and faced the best of the best, including road games in Starkville, Oxford and Tuscaloosa. Regardless of the results, those were vital trips on the learning curve for a quarterback who could be a starter for two more seasons.
* As important, perplexing and tantalizing as anything else, there remains an awful lot of unknown with Harris because consistency has eluded him. Yes, he passed for 2,165 yards and 13 TDs and added 226 on the ground last season. But it was too much Forrest Gump and box of chocolates: You never knew what you were going to get.
So the question that hangs over an LSU offense that has to take a quantum leap ahead in 2016 to match the returning talent and high-level expectations is simple: How much better can Brandon Harris be?
Understand now, Harris doesn’t have to be prolific. LSU doesn’t need him to fling the ball all over the field and rack up 300 yards every game as long as Leonard Fournette and Derrius Guice are healthy and running the ball the way they have proven that they can.
It’s a popular and easy crutch to say the Tigers have to completely revamp their offense, but that’s just not accurate. As Miles pointed out in his now famous Lazarus-like news conference after the last regular-season game, it doesn’t make any sense for LSU to completely swim upstream from relying on the power running game with Nos. 7 and 5 in purple-and-gold.
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