What to Watch for: Florida

Now that Kentucky has essentially killed the Ed Orgeron era, the rest of the season is pretty much a lame duck, meaningless slate of football games. There’s frankly little to really watch for anymore, the roster has fallen apart due to injuries and the only concern of LSU football is what comes next. Anyway, the games are still happening.

For Florida

No Throwing Clothing

Simple one here, don’t throw your opponent’s equipment.

Blitz or Drop 8

There are really two ways to attack the LSU offense defensively. You know they’re bad at running the ball (despite improvement a week ago) so you can easily just treat them like Mississippi State and drop 8 into your coverage, both clogging underneath passing windows and capping deep routes with a quarters or 3 high coverage shell. You can also blitz their spread out offense to hell and force Max Johnson to make quick decisions under pressure. Todd Grantham loves to blitz, but they have multiple extremely effective pass rushers and could probably generate a rush with just three or four if they use enough simulated pressures to confuse Johnson and the offensive line. I suspect they’ll bring a ton of pressure.

Turn Back the Clock

It’s gonna be interesting to watch an offense completely turn it back to 2010 and go full spread option. I expect zone read, power read, speed option, all of it. Leave the defensive end unblocked and read him. Simple option football against the rigid, old fronts it used to attack so effectively.

For LSU

Effort

I’m honestly fascinated to see how hard they play for Orgeron knowing that this is the end. When you factor in the loss of your best players as well, it’d be easy for them to just lay down and mail it in. I’m interested to see the effort level.

Adjusting to Personnel

Before, it was impractical for LSU to stay locked in the same static cover 1 on the back end, but now without Ricks and Stingley, it’s profoundly ridiculous. I’m interested to see what Daronte Jones does on Saturday without good corners. I’m not going to ask them to switch up their fronts anymore in these because they just won’t do it so it’s pointless. That said, you can’t do what you were doing before with these corners, you probably couldn’t do it anyway given how predictable and static it was.

Young Receivers

A year ago, when Terrace Marshall opted out, Kayshon Boutte took over and launched himself into stardom. Now that Boutte has gone down, guys like Jack Bech, Brian Thomas Jr., Deion Smith, and Malik Nabers have the opportunity to take that next step with some more responsibility. It’ll be a good look at those guys for LSU’s next head coach and offensive coordinator.