PODCAST: What can the LSU offense fix during its bye week?

On this week’s edition of the Bengal Tiger Mailbag podcast, Matthew Brune and Shea Dixon take subscriber questions on everything LSU football, from the offense’s struggles to the changes that need to be made this bye week.

Can the Tigers get right before South Carolina comes to town in two weeks? What do the changes look like? All of that and plenty more in this week’s show.

Check out the full episode wherever you get your podcasts and stay tuned to the YouTube channel and podcast feeds for the latest on LSU football. Enjoy the podcast? Leave a like on YouTube or a five star rating on Apple or Spotify.

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On the Pod: LSU offense’s biggest problem

Matthew Brune: “I think it’s hard for me to eliminate the Nussmeier aspect because I’m not sure what else can drastically improve this year. You just wrote a story about it — the run game is the run game. It’s been the run game under Brian Kelly pretty much since he’s gotten here. The only thing, in my eyes, that can make progress is the passing game. And that comes back to Garrett Nussmeier.

I think the receivers are still fine. You can scheme things up to a degree, but dude, if Garrett Nussmeier can’t throw the ball, I have trouble saying that they can take significant steps forward with this version of Garrett Nussmeier. Because they just can’t run the ball. They can’t. They just can’t do it.

So that’s kind of my crux, and that’s something we’ll talk about. It’s hard for me to have realistic changes like, “Oh, yeah, we can change the right tackle. Cool. We can change wide receiver rotations or running back rotations.” But at the end of the day, they can’t run the ball. I’ve given up on that. The only thing I believe in that could possibly get better someday is quarterback play. And that’s my hope.”

Shea Dixon: “I’m with you completely. I think everything boils down to—look, I could grade out, and I have a story on this for this week on The Bengal Tiger. The grade across the first month of the season for the defense is an A. Special teams is an A. Ramos has been excellent, Chadwick’s been excellent. You’ve got multiple return men on your team who, when given a chance on punts, can do something.

But the offense? We’ve seen — minus an FCS opponent — the same result each time. They’re able to score one or two touchdowns. They get some field goals, and it takes a lot of effort to even pull that off. In turn, you’re wasting this very good special teams and defense.

And I could go through all the numbers of it, but here’s the reality: LSU is the second-to-worst run offense in the SEC right now. Yards per play is what I like to look at there. South Carolina is the only one that’s worse. South Carolina does not have a winning record in the conference and is playing far below expectations.

If you don’t have that — which you didn’t a year ago — then you have to have a pass game. Nuss threw for 4,000 yards. To put it in perspective, that was the second-most in program history behind Joe Burrow. We saw Nuss make a million 30-yard throws a year ago. They’ve called those plays this year, and he’s short-armed them. In every game but Southeastern, he’s been off. After the game, Brian Kelly and Nuss were mum on injury status, but after the Florida win — when he struggled — Brian Kelly said he’d been dealing with a torso injury.

When he looked better against Southeastern and didn’t seem to be struggling to push the ball downfield, we took that as hope. But against Ole Miss, we saw what we’d seen earlier in the year — him struggling to do anything deep. Because of that, they have to work the short and intermediate game. And because of that, they don’t really do anything when they’re on offense.”