Film study: As QB Brandon Harris goes, so too will the Tigers

You don’t know what you have until it’s gone. That’s what people say. In 12 games or so time, perhaps 13, possibly 14, maybe even 15, that will be the case for the LSU football team.

Leonard Fournette is the best offensive player in college football. Equal parts size, speed, power, and short area quickness. It may sound like hyperbole, but it’s not. It’s a fact. And before you can even blink those extraterrestrial talents will be walking across a stage, shaking the hand of a commissioner, and off to the realm of Pro Football. Gone forever.

Fournette is a transcendent star. The kind you build a program around. The kind you hand the ball to again and again, health be damned. The kind you enter the Carrier Dome with no need for a plan, and leave with a 244-yard performance and a win.

The SEC is used to special talents. They see them every week. But I’m not sure they’ve seen anything like Fournette since Herschel Walker. The build, the size, the speed and the power. Think Todd Gurley with extra inches in height and extra pounds in muscle.

In what will be his last year in Baton Rouge there is great pressure on LSU to cash in on his extraordinary talent, and end the Fournette-era with at least an SEC crown.

There is no doubt that Fournette will hold up on his end of the bargain. The key question is: What else can LSU do on offense to make a push toward a title game? And that’s where quarterback Brandon Harris, the to the Tigers’ title aspirations, comes into play.

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Back in the mid-2000s as the University of Miami crushed everyone in its wake, they were considered a great “off the bus” team. A team that stepped off the bus, looked the part, walked the part and acted the part. They won some games by stepping off that bus and putting the fear of God into those who stood before them. They towered over competition like an NFL squad competing for a high school regional championship.

The 2016 off-the-bus champion may well be LSU. The school returned NFL caliber players and has, perhaps, the greatest collection of athletes in the country on both sides of the ball.

You could be forgiven for confusing the 2016 football team, stepping off that bus, with the 2016 basketball squad. Wide receivers Malachi Dupre and Travin Dural are part football player, part Pterodactyl, somehow granted NCAA eligibility. Each stands at over 6 feet, 2 inches, with arms that the NBA looks at enviously.

Size and length are being prioritized in football like never before. It’s why great athletes like Jadeveon Clowney are drafted ahead of great football players like Khalil Mack.

The sport is evolving in front of our eyes, in philosophy and physique. Offenses are running pace-and-space attacks, defenses are using more zone/man hybrid, pattern-match defenses, and skill-position talent is getting longer, taller and quicker.

Dupre and Duval are the second and third heads of LSU’s three-headed monster on offense.

Their combination of speed and length makes them a devastating duo at all levels of the defense. They can high-point the ball in contested catch situations, and their catching radius diminishes the accuracy concerns of their quarterback, Harris.

A receiver’s length, and the ability to contort their body, forms their “catching radius” the radius at which they are able to haul in passes. The bigger the radius, the less accurate the quarterback needs to be. Many judge a quarterback’s accuracy by their completion percentage, but completion percentage doesn’t differentiate between an accurately thrown ball and a play made by a receiver to haul in a poorly thrown ball. Only the tape shows accuracy: Was it a catchable ball? Did the quarterback give an opportunity for yards after the catch? And does he have the vision/timing to fit balls into tight windows?

Adding receivers with big frames, and a big radius, minimizes some of those risks.

It’s a practice preached at the top of the sport. Cam Newton, for all his talents, isn’t in the upper echelon of NFL quarterbacks in accuracy. He can be scattershot. When he misses, he often misses by a lot. Carolina Panthers general manager David Gettleman noted this and built a receiving corps on the foundation of size and length; Kelvin Benjamin (6-5), Devin Funchess (6-4), Greg Olsen (6-5), et al. All of whom have size and arm length, mitigating some of the long-term concerns over Newton’s accuracy.

LSU has the same thing, whether by coincidence or design.

Their quarterback, Harris, is also a scattershot thrower, completing about 54 percent of his career passes. Dupre and Dural are huge factors in helping limit the accuracy concerns, building a competent passing offense and taking as much pressure off Fournette and the rushing attack as possible.

The Brandon Harris Question

If you’re talking about “get off the bus” quarterbacks, Harris, 6-3, 206, looks the part. But once the ball is snapped, and it is time to act the part, he has struggled.

Sure, he has the size, mobility and arm talent you crave in a college starter. But the decision-making, accuracy and mental processing have been woefully deficient. Some of those you can scheme out; build in more half-field reads, designed runs, rollouts and make the decision for the player pre-snap rather than rely on them post-snap.

That limits the offense, but when you’re rolling with a crew of four- and five-star talents it doesn’t always matter; see Alabama marshalled by Blake Simms or Jake Coker.

Heading into 2016 LSU needs a big leap in development from Harris.

Prognosticators claim another year older, another year of experience, another year wiser. I don’t really do the experience argument. I get it. Spend longer in a job and you should become better at it. I prefer the talent argument. Jameis Winston led Florida State to a national title in his redshirt freshman year because he was the most talented player in the country. Johnny Manziel shattered the SEC total offense record as a freshman, because he was the most talented player in the conference. And Cam Newton, in his only year with Auburn, led the Tigers on a historic national title run, because he was the most talented player in the nation.

Harris has undeniable physical ability; he is mobile and has a huge arm. The problem is that he does everything too late and too slow. The tape shows he’s too slow to process, too slow with his decision-making, and too slow to get the ball out, all that with a lack of rhythm and timing, and accuracy issues to all areas of the field that stem from sloppy upper body mechanics.

And yet, in amongst that you see flashes of brilliance. Flashes that make you question whether this team, with talent at every other spot, will ever lose another game.

Then you dig back in and the down-to-down consistency is so poor that you know it will take either remarkable personal growth, or a remarkable coaching job for Harris to be what the Tigers need him to be.

All they need is Harris to be efficient and largely mistake free. Yet nothing he has shown thus far in two seasons gives any positive indication toward that. We can claim, with no knowledge, that simply being older will provide that, but the tape and history tell a different story.

With that said, it’s not all doom and gloom for Harris. There is a reason people still speak of untapped potential and Les Miles continues to persist with him as the starting quarterback. Interestingly, Harris ranked top in completion percentage on throws under pressure throughout the SEC, per ProFootballFocus, and the most iconic throw of his LSU tenure came with pressure right in his face vs Alabama.

If Harris is able to put it together, find that consistency, and join Fournette, Dupre and Duval as the fourth head of this offensive monster, there isn’t a side in the country who could contain them. But we’ve been down this path with LSU before. If only Zach Mettenberger had put it together earlier the school wouldn’t have wasted an offense that featured Odell Beckham, Jarvis Landry and Jeremy Hill.

Here’s to hoping that the Fournette-era ends in a more satisfactory way: with the best player in the nation playing on the nation’s biggest stage.

LSU has had great talents before, and they’ll have great talents again, but they likely won’t realize quite what they had in Fournette until they open the 2017 season with someone else stood behind their quarterback and with Fournette playing on Sundays.