Lane Kiffin’s QB decision has the attention, but overhauling LSU’s dormant ground game is paramount
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I could hear the pain in Jacob Hester’s voice any time that he’d talk about the LSU run game.
Long gone were the days in which he’d line up and run “power” behind a road-grading offensive line, perhaps even with a fullback leading the way. It wasn’t as if Hester held out hope that LSU would turn back time and bust out the Les Miles offense. But watching his Bayou Bengals stumble into one of the worst rushing attacks in America gave Hester angst in ways that few things could.
This was the face that Hester made a month ago when he said the words “Connor, LSU football hasn’t run a power this year. Not a single power. When I was playing, we couldn’t have a series without running a power, much less an entire season … it blows my mind.”
(And yeah, that was me putting my head down in dismay.)
Enter Lane Kiffin, stage right.
Kiffin’s up-tempo, spread offense won’t exactly remind anyone of the Hester-led LSU rushing attacks, but that’s fine. What seems imminent is that he’ll jump-start an identity-less LSU rushing attack. The unit that hit 130 yards against just 2 FBS foes figures to look completely different under this new regime, regardless of who ends up playing quarterback. LSU’s season-high in the regular season was 166 rushing yards against 4-8 South Carolina. In Kiffin’s last 9 seasons as a head coach, his worst rushing attack was the 2018 Florida Atlantic squad that averaged… 166 rushing yards.
You could look at some of the raw LSU rushing numbers during the 2020s and convince yourself that it wasn’t an issue. After all, the Tigers are 2 years removed from having the No. 11 run game in the sport with a mobile Heisman Trophy winner who got seemingly every blade of grass that he wanted.
But in 6 seasons in the 2020s, the only instances in which LSU finished with a top 100 rushing attack was when Jayden Daniels was the starting quarterback. The only LSU running back to eclipse 800 rushing yards in the 2020s was when Tyrion Davis-Price hit 1,003 yards in 2021. That also came in a lost season in which Ed Orgeron was fired … and 43% of Davis-Price’s rushing production came in a 2-game stretch for a rushing attack that still finished No. 114 in the FBS (it was also No. 121 with just 9 rushing touchdowns).
Clyde Edwards-Helaire was the last LSU running back to earn All-SEC honors at season’s end
Of the schools who have been in the SEC since the start of the decade — that excludes Oklahoma and Texas — LSU, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt are the only ones who haven’t produced 1 All-SEC back in the 2020s.
Three different times, Kiffin’s offense produced that at Ole Miss. Quinshon Judkins did it twice — he was also the only SEC player in the 2020s to hit 1,500 rushing yards and 15 rushing touchdowns until Ahmad Hardy joined that club in 2025 — and most recently, Mizzou transfer Kewan Lacy did it.
It remains to be seen if Lacy, who led Power Conference backs in the regular season with 86 missed tackles forced (LSU’s entire team had 47), will follow Kiffin and that offensive staff to Baton Rouge. It helped that Kiffin reportedly poached Ole Miss running backs coach Kevin Smith. Obviously, bringing over a Doak Award finalist who set the Ole Miss single-season rushing touchdown record — he had more than twice as many rushing touchdowns (20) in the regular season as the entire LSU team (9) — would check the “fix the ground game” box in an instant. But even if Lacy doesn’t go to his third SEC school in as many seasons, Kiffin has shown that he’ll still run a ground-heavy approach with a stable of backs.
When Ole Miss had its worst ground game of the Kiffin era in 2024, it still averaged 38 rushing attempts (and 168 yards) per game. Compare that to LSU, who hasn’t averaged that many rushing attempts in a game since 2018, AKA Year 1 of Joe Burrow. That explains why LSU’s running backs have totaled just 7 100-yard games since the start of 2022, none of which happened in 2025 (H/T Zach Nunez).
An overhaul is coming, both schematically and philosophically. If nothing else in Year 1, that should be evident with Kiffin and Charlie Weis Jr. running the show.
“The foundation of (LSU’s) offense to me, it was mind-boggling to watch the tape and see the things that they weren’t doing, the things that they weren’t attacking,” Hester told me in November. “Now you’re trying to fix all of that. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
That fixing won’t include running backs coach Frank Wilson, who pulled the inverse move and left for Ole Miss. It remains to be seen how that’ll impact the current backs on the LSU roster like 2025 preseason All-SEC back Caden Durham and former 5-star running back Harlem Berry, who got double-digit carries in all 4 regular season games after Brian Kelly was fired.
Kiffin has plenty to sort out, but if there’s a safe bet for his time in Baton Rouge, it’s that he’s eventually going to make LSU’s Achilles’ heel a thing of the past. Perhaps with that, LSU can soon do something else that it hasn’t done in the 2020s. Not just run power; a different kind of run has eluded LSU.
A Playoff run.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
