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Ryan Hockensmith
JOE BURROW sits in the back of the conference room as the meeting begins. His new LSU teammates are baffled by him. It’s the summer of 2018, and they think he either doesn’t quite understand how much they don’t want him as their quarterback or that he really doesn’t care.
Either way, they don’t like him, and that’s why this players-only meeting is happening. Burrow arrived as a grad transfer from Ohio State a few weeks earlier when he lost a spring battle with Dwayne Haskins.
He’s buff and gruff, with players whispering that the Ohio State weight room must be awesome but that they must not teach bedside manner in Columbus. Burrow gets his own apartment and does almost no commiserating with other players for his first few weeks. In introductions, Burrow would say, “Hi, I’m Joe, nice to meet you,” and that’s it. No big smiles. No small talk. No “we should hang out sometime.” He’s there for business, and at that time, LSU had an insular, veteran locker room that had zero interest in an outsider who wasn’t even trying to be friendly and deferential.
So on this day, Burrow arrives at an edgy team facility for a player-led workout. Before the Tigers go out on the field, word spreads that the captains want Burrow to address the team. Tensions have skyrocketed around the idea of the new, chilly quarterback disrupting what was supposed to be a competition between vets Myles Brennan and Justin McMillan. McMillan seemed to have the slight edge coming out of spring ball and is well liked by teammates as a career grinder on the precipice of his big chance.
“I’d say the mood was 95% against Joe,” says former LSU tight end Thaddeus Moss. “He is a great guy, very personable and cool once you get to know him. But he was very, very focused and specific about what he was doing. So he can come off like a d—head because he cares so much about what he’s focused on.”
Moss pauses for a full three seconds. “I’m trying to come up with a word you can use,” he says. “Nah, d—head is the best way to describe it.”
When the meeting starts, players are told the goal is to clear the air and let everybody hear directly from the new quarterback. Even though the locker room is anti-Burrow, there are murmurs that LSU coaches believe Burrow could be a star.
Burrow walks to the front of the team room. He knows that he is an unwelcome unknown here. But he also understands himself enough to not pretend to be buddy-buddy. He’s been a professional football player in his head since kindergarten, so his sales pitch is more about what he can do for his teammates, not with them.
“Hey guys, you all know I didn’t play much at Ohio State,” he says. “I had some injuries and didn’t get on the field much. But I know I can be good — I know it. I’m excited to be here at LSU. I think we have a great team, and I think we can win the national title. I really believe that.
“I only care about you guys and winning. Nothing else. I don’t care if I win awards or even if I’m the starting quarterback. I think I’m going to be the best quarterback on the team. But if I’m not, if somebody else wins the job, you’re going to be the most hydrated team in the country because I’m going to be the best waterboy.
“I just want to win, no matter what my role is.”
When Burrow finishes, heads are nodding. Momentum has swung toward giving him a chance. But now he has to answer a harder question on the field a few minutes later: Can this Joe Burrow guy actually play?
ON THE FINAL PLAY of the 2018 Ohio State spring game, Burrow takes the snap at the 42-yard line and throws a perfect lob down the right sideline. Wideout Demario McCall pulls it in and scores, giving Burrow a final stat line of 15-for-22, 228 yards and two touchdowns.
That was Burrow’s last throw at Ohio State. Haskins was the favorite to replace J.T. Barrett, and Burrow seemed to realize after the spring game that he was likely going to lose out to the future first-round pick. “Well, I came here to play,” he said afterward. “I didn’t come here to sit on the bench for four years. I know I’m a pretty good quarterback. I want to play somewhere.”
Burrow got his business degree on May 6, and he began looking around. Cincinnati was on the list, with former Buckeye coach Luke Fickell making the case for Burrow to stay home in Ohio, where he was named Mr. Football in 2014. LSU safeties coach Bill Busch, an old friend of Burrow’s dad Jimmy, reached out and said Joe should think about Baton Rouge.
Busch hyped up Tigers coach Ed Orgeron by saying, “If we get Joe Burrow, we can win a national title.” Orgeron and the rest of the LSU staff basically asked the same thing the players did: “Uh, who is Joe Burrow?”
Busch coached Jimmy at Nebraska many years earlier, and the Burrows, Jimmy and Robin, trusted him. Busch directly answered their main concern: Would Burrow come in and be put into an open competition — or was he thought of as a very nice No. 2 option?
Busch assured them that Burrow could win the job, and then assured Orgeron that Burrow would end up being the guy. Orgeron was open to the idea. But he’d also spent the spring being very vocal that he expected one of the current Tigers quarterbacks to battle it out that summer to become the starter.
Orgeron thought it was worth a shot, though, and so he tells his staff to go get him. Busch teams up with offensive assistant Jorge Munoz and Orgeron’s chief of staff, Derek Ponamsky, to get the deal done with Burrow. Munoz and Ponamsky had plans to go to the beach together with their wives, but they canceled to land Burrow. When Ponamsky tells his wife, Leanne, that he has to stay behind, she says, “This guy better win the f—ing Heisman.”
As their wives hung out at the beach, Ponamsky and Munoz set up the official visit. This would be Team Burrow, with Ponamsky handling logistics and Munoz teaching him to play quarterback. “I’m coming there to play football, so I don’t want any theatrics,” Burrow told them. “Let’s just have dinner and talk football.” The one thing he wanted during the trip? Some crawfish.
The dinner was arranged, and Burrow and his parents came to Baton Rouge. When they were on the way to the restaurant, Orgeron and the coaching staff realized they had a problem: The restaurant didn’t have crawfish on the menu.
“I got a guy,” Orgeron said, and a Seal Team 6-level operation was underway. Ponamsky sent a staffer to meet Orgeron’s crawfish connection across town, and about 25 pounds of crawfish were brought to the restaurant in a tub right around the time the Burrows arrived.
The dinner was great. Burrow believed the coaches when they said he had a legitimate shot at the starting job, and they liked how grown-up he was. His former LSU coaches and teammates still marvel at the way that Burrow isn’t just a hard worker; he’s one of those sickos who derives great pleasure from the single-minded pursuit of practicing, playing and strategizing about football. It’d be silly to call it his hobby or his calling — because it’s both.
After the trip, Burrow wanted to sit with his decision. If he made the wrong choice, his NFL chances would be practically gone. Alabama and North Carolina both indicated late interest, though Burrow was dubious about his shot of starting at either place right away. But he also believed he could beat out just about anybody, anywhere.
“No more calls and no more visits,” Burrow told his parents. “I just need time to think.”
“OK, we’ll let everybody know,” Jimmy said. “Your mom and I will keep in touch.”
“No,” Burrow said. “That means no more calls from you two, either.”
They both gulped and said OK. The Burrows are remarkably present in Joe’s life. Jimmy was drafted by the Packers in 1976 before settling into a lifelong coaching career, working at various Power 5 schools before spending his final 14 seasons in Ohio. He’d hustle and make it to as many of the Burrow kids’ games as possible but his wife, Robin, an elementary school principal, made it to everything. She says once Joe got old enough, she felt like showing up at practice every day probably wouldn’t go over well, but she went anyway. “I’d have to park way far away and watch from a distance,” she jokes.
In this case, they let Joe sequester himself. After a few days, he called them with a decision that would forever alter college football history: Geaux Tigers.
BURROW IS TOUGH and feisty, with an especially cool aura that makes every Sunday afternoon walk-in seem like an AI creation of what a fashionable, unflappable quarterback might look like. But in real life, this period in Burrow’s young adulthood is a perfect window into what a hard outer shell that is.
He spends the first 10 days in Baton Rouge inside a hotel, mostly alone with his thoughts. He has his parents, Ponamsky and Munoz helping him with the logistics of a mad dash to get enrolled. Housing, paperwork, transcripts — it’s four months of bureaucracy crammed into a week and a half.
But Burrow also has a spiritual rebirth underway, one that nobody could help him with except for him. He has a big bag of chips on his shoulder and about 18 months to show he can play, after withering in the shadows at Ohio State for three years. When he looks back now, Burrow says he often imagines how many players out there in the football world are like him, locked somewhere low on the depth chart, suffering as their dreams die with every outstanding practice day that’s followed by a game day on the sidelines.
Three years had been long enough. He had to go. And he had to stick the landing. By the time he transferred, Burrow says he had gone so far as to start thinking about a life without football. Think about that for a second; imagine the NFL without Joe Burrow for the past five years because he went to work at Goldman Sachs instead.
In an interview for this story, Burrow is reflective and vulnerable about the end of his time at Ohio State. “Those three years were tough mentally,” Burrow says now. “You don’t really realize what you’re going through until you look back and realize how unhappy you were.
“I just relied on trust in myself and the work that I put in that it ultimately would see the light of day. I got the right opportunity at the right time. In the back of my mind, I was thinking maybe I’d have to get a real job. I definitely didn’t want to. But I thought I kind of had to at that point.”
That fuels him when he first arrives in Baton Rouge, and even LSU coaches are taken aback by his level of seriousness. He had one full week on campus before his teammates all arrived. So Burrow called strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt and said he wanted to know everything — how the team lifted, stretched, walked out onto the field, what they wore, what kind of music was played at practice, everything. “I didn’t want to look like a freshman when the whole team got back,” Burrow says now.
For five straight days, Burrow exhausted Moffitt with questions about every piece of minutiae he could imagine. And Moffitt, in turn, ran Burrow into the ground to get him ready for LSU’s infamous spring conditioning drill, which features an amount of running that breaks many players. “I don’t want to pass the conditioning test,” Burrow said. “I want to win every single run.”
Moffitt nodded, but he didn’t think that was possible. Burrow had to do 26 different runs against all of the quarterbacks, tight ends and linebackers, where Burrow’s athleticism probably ranked about 20th of the 25 or so players. Moffitt never had a single player, at any position group, win every run.
And yet, Burrow won every run. All of the coaches and players noticed, especially LSU’s very vocal group of linebackers, led by Devin White and Patrick Queen. A part of them were impressed. But they also seemed to be licking their chops to get a crack at throwing chin music at the try-hard from Ohio.
The 2017 team defense had been alphas on the practice field and in the locker room, and the 2018 squad would ultimately be dominated by defensive stars White, Queen and Grant Delpit. This was their team, and a few weeks after the conditioning test — and five minutes after Burrow’s players-only speech — they wanted to test the new guy.
On that day, LSU team captains lead a series of 7-on-7s where everybody is supposed to be going 50%. But this practice seems especially chippy, with defensive players barking nonstop at the offense, with nobody on offense responding. White and Queen won’t shut up, and both privately told others that they liked to chew up their own quarterbacks before any other SEC defenses could. This is their chance to pressure-test this Burrow guy that everybody seems to be buying into.
They’re relentless. They insult the Big Ten and the entire state of Ohio. His long, flowing hair. Ohio State. His headband. They say the entire offense is soft like Joe Burrow. But then Burrow stuns everybody, even his offensive brethren, by yelling, “Shut the f— up,” to White. When other defensive players jump in, Burrow tells them the same thing.
Burrow has been unleashed, and it’s ferocious. He doesn’t seem like someone who’d ever yell at a flight attendant or an Uber driver. But his football chatter is nasty and unyielding, and he famously has said he doesn’t believe there should be any taunting penalties or fines in the NFL. In his mind, anything goes. “That’s why I love the game, because it’s so intense and emotional for people,” he says. “Without that, the game is nothing.”
They keep goofing on his hair, but Burrow begins to work over the defense a bit. He notices his offensive teammates starting to get a little more vocal, empowered by their quarterback. Their guy — as of a half hour ago — is sticking it to the defense. White hates it, and keeps chattering, which causes Burrow to keep going.
Munoz always loved watching White and Burrow, because they managed to constantly dog each other and then shake it off after practice. Players on both sides took their cues from veterans who could be incredibly fiery but all in the name of each other. “Devin White was never looking for a fight — he was looking for someone to step up and say [f— you],” Munoz says. “When Devin would laugh and walk away, that helped everybody believe in Joe Burrow.”
The two units end up playing to essentially a draw in that June 2018 session. But the overall day is a giant win. Moss and the offense feel like they may have found their quarterback. And the defense thinks maybe the team just found the final piece of a title puzzle. “Everybody left that day saying, ‘We’re rocking with Joe Burrow,'” says Moss, son of NFL legend Randy and still a close friend to Burrow.
A week or so later, Burrow holds a throwing session. He invites every member of the receiver corps, but not everybody shows up. It’s still a little weird for the quarterback who might be third on the depth chart to be organizing involuntary workouts. So Burrow throws with the guys who are there.
Jimmy Burrow is on the sidelines that day — he and Robin still went to LSU practices any time they were in town. They never said much. They just loved quietly being there for him, figuratively and literally. Moss paints a beautiful portrait of so many quiet offseason workouts during that time where it was just him and Burrow running routes, with Jimmy and Robin watching, silently, present without making a presence. Their No. 1 mantra as parents was to always show up, and Burrow has picked up on that modeled behavior. They show up for stuff, and so does he.
Jimmy’s watching when he hears a loud voice off to the side of him. It’s an LSU player but he doesn’t stare long enough to get an ID. He just assumes it’s a receiver. He moseys on over, pretending that he isn’t trying to eavesdrop, and picks up that the player is blasting multiple skill guys for not being at the workout. He darts a quick glance over to see who it is, and his eyebrows raise when he gets a good look at the guy.
It isn’t a receiver. It’s not even an offensive player. It’s Devin White.
THERE IS A VERSION of Joe Burrow in every workplace — a tough manager who is unambiguous and uncompromising but makes people better, which makes people like the results before they like the leader. Then they love him.
Even in two months at LSU in the summer of 2018, Burrow emerged as that guy. Players who attended his workouts all felt like they were improving, and Burrow’s focus became an infectious disease. His new teammates quickly began to speak Burrow, which meant everybody needed to have on their big boy pants. Several players were startled at first when they’d tell Burrow they couldn’t make it to a session and he’d respond, “That’s fine. I guess you don’t want to be great.”
Coaches would hear about those moments and marvel that somebody could show up on campus and six weeks later be firing off very punchable commentary on a teammate’s work ethic. But most of the time, the roasted teammate would start popping in at Burrow’s throwing sessions, and the weight room, and the film room. Burrow was somehow rubbing people the wrong way but also rubbing off on them.
When summer practice kicked off, all eyes were on the quarterback situation. McMillan and Brennan were very good high school prospects who had been at LSU and earned teammates’ respect. Burrow split snaps with those two, plus freshman Lowell Narcisse, for the first chunk of practices and scrimmages. Physically, Brennan and McMillan looked great under center and had bigger arms. But Burrow’s prep work, accuracy and competitiveness swung momentum his way in August. By the middle of the month, McMillan announced he was transferring to Tulane.
Brennan battled it out with Burrow all month, and it was close. He had all the physical tools and had put in the reps with teammates. Brennan has a warm presence, full of smiles, so Burrow was quite a contrast in vibes.
At 6:30 a.m. on the Monday before the season opener at Miami, Orgeron called in both quarterbacks to name a starter. Munoz brought two notebooks. He exhaustively graded every play of both quarterbacks for the entire month of August, from the accuracy of throws to footwork to eye movement, and had video clips cued up to support the coaches’ final decision.
“Joe, you won the job,” Orgeron said. “But you will be on a short leash-you have to go out there and perform.”
Going in, Brennan had thought maybe Burrow was going to be the pick. But he was bummed, nonetheless, and didn’t say much as Munoz walked through his notebooks. Burrow noticed. He may not be the most Tony Robbins-y guy, but he is a damn good teammate with a good radar for who needs what and when. There’s a reason why many former teammates and coaches can rattle off a harsh motivational story about Burrow and then rave 10 seconds later about how much they appreciate the guy.
On their way out of the room, Burrow shook Brennan’s hand and said, “I want you to push me every day.”
It’s a testament to both players that they ended up being close friends. Burrow lived by himself both years at LSU, so the only roommate he ever had was Brennan on game weekends when they’d share a room on the road or at a hotel off campus for home games. Brennan watched and learned from the way Burrow powered into and through a gameday, still pushing till kickoff for that one last edge that might snatch a win. They’d occasionally just hang out, with Burrow asking Brennan questions about hunting and fishing, or Burrow putting on “Spongebob Squarepants” or “Ancient Aliens” on the History Channel. “Joe’s a great guy, and he made me better,” Brennan says now.
In that first game against Miami, Hurricanes players came out and started barking at LSU as the Tigers warmed up. The teams began to drift toward each other, and Burrow pushed through the entire LSU squad to get to the front, where he did an L sign on his forehead. And when LSU finished off a 33-17 rout of the No. 8 Canes, Burrow made sure to throw an L toward Miami fans, too. The feisty new guy was fitting in just fine.
The season was, on the whole, quite good. Burrow was solid but unspectacular (16 passing touchdowns and five interceptions, with only one 300-yard game). He’d taken over the team and was the clear starter throughout. But he never quite saw it that way, which coaches say is why there is at least a low-simmer in his stomach at all times. Against Rice in November, the LSU offense had sputtered a bit before opening up a 35-3 lead in the third quarter. When coaches pulled Burrow, he paced the sidelines with his hands on his hips, frustrated, before asking his mentor, Munoz, “Am I still the starting quarterback?”
Munoz thought he was joking. He wasn’t. “I took that not as a lack of confidence,” Munoz says. “I took that as the chip on his shoulder that drives him.”
LSU got to 9-2 before a legendary 7-OT loss against Texas A&M. Burrow finished with 270 yards passing and 29 carries for 100 yards. He was so beaten up in the locker room that he needed an IV and applesauce packets to muster the energy to walk to the team bus. “If there was anybody who didn’t think Joe was the baddest motherf—er in our program, they realized it that day,” Ponamsky says.
With a big win over undefeated UCF in the Fiesta Bowl, LSU finished 10-3 and on an upswing heading into 2019. Burrow got feedback that indicated he’d gone from an undrafted free agent grade to likely third-day pick. Coaches came to the conclusion that with a receiver corps led by Justin Jefferson and Ja’Marr Chase, they needed to build the 2019 offense around Burrow and a more wide-open passing attack.
Even the most optimistic Tiger coach, fan or player, though, couldn’t know that Joe Burrow and LSU were about to have perhaps the best single season in college football history.
BURROW HAD A WHIRLWIND spring and early summer, leading team workouts and giving more input than ever to what the offense could look like in 2019. He no longer needed to pester people about coming to his throwing sessions; they just knew that that was the place to be if you wanted to see the ball.
One time a receiver complained to offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger that he’d missed a throwing session, then heard Burrow say to the other quarterbacks, “You guys can throw to him, because I’m not going to.” The player wanted Ensminger to intervene. But instead, Ensminger chuckled and said, “You need to work that out with Joe on your own.”
Burrow loved the guys who kept coming, regardless of where they sat on the depth chart. That offseason, he got close with one of his other backups, AJ Aycock. When Burrow was at the facility, Aycock was there, too, and it impressed Burrow. At one point before the 2019 season, Aycock texted Burrow that he hoped he had a role with the team. Burrow responded with, “Don’t worry, I got you.” He had gone to the coaching staff and asked that Aycock be the team’s primary signal caller from the sidelines, both at home and on the road. That season, every big Burrow play originated with a hand signal from Aycock on the sidelines.
That stuff mattered. Burrow was renowned for sitting with random collections of players in the cafeteria, and he’d routinely go out of his way to not sit with his closest friends. There’s a version of that guy who is a wannabe man of the people and elicits more groans than anything else but that’s not Burrow’s brand. He is one big clique, and everybody is in it. “He’s naturally cool — he isn’t trying to be cool,” Brennan says. “He just is.”
That spring, LSU went all-in on a more aggressive offense. Jefferson had a nice 2018 (54 catches, 875 yards) but he looked like a future NFL superstar in March, partially due to nonstop workouts with Burrow. Same with Chase, who’d had 23 catches for 313 yards as a freshman in 2018. And as soon as the LSU defense spread out and tried to get a grip on the flanks, Burrow would hand to Clyde Edwards-Helaire for 12 yards up the gut.
By mid-spring, things were again getting chippy between the offense and defense, which wasn’t used to getting worked. That led to an incident that LSU coaches and players still shake their heads about — because it could have ended that magical 2019 season before it even began.
Burrow was nursing a shoulder injury that spring and had to dial it down at most practices. He insisted on participating as much as possible, but coaches put him in a special jersey so he wouldn’t face any contact. The other quarterbacks wore red unis that indicated “Do not hit,” and Burrow wore a black one that indicated “Don’t even breathe near this guy.”
At a now-infamous scrimmage in March, LSU practices at Tiger Stadium and allows a select group of heavy-hitter boosters to watch from the stands. Coaches stress that players are to be on their best behavior.
That plan goes awry almost immediately. The weather is very hot, and Orgeron had been dogging the defense about getting torn up by Burrow and Co. That leads to some questionable late shots, and jawing begins between the offense and defense. For the first time all spring, the defense is getting the best of the offense and peacocking about it.
On one play, safety JaCoby Stevens blitzes right into Burrow’s face. As Burrow unloads the ball, Stevens jumps and deflects the ball back toward Burrow. His body momentum carries him into Burrow and knocks the quarterback on his butt.
Burrow begins yelling at Stevens, and then both sides start to converge as coaches intervene. For the sake of calming down practice, Stevens gets sent over to stand on the sidelines with the rest of the defense.
A few plays later, Burrow rolls right and there’s Queen, blitzing right into his face. Burrow throws the ball away and Queen just stands in front of him smiling and clapping. He stares too long, though, for Burrow’s liking. So Burrow throws an open-hand slap that hits Queen in the helmet, and all hell breaks loose.
Queen rips off Burrow’s helmet, so Burrow rips off his. They are punching and flailing when Burrow lands on top of Queen. By that point, the entire roster of LSU is fighting, with a dogpile on top of Burrow and Queen. Coaches are screaming. Boosters are gasping. It’s chaos, with about 2,000 pounds of football players crushing down on Burrow and Queen.
Eventually, coaches manage to separate everybody, with much fist-shaking and finger-wagging about the stupidity of a spring team fight, especially involving the already-injured starting QB. To this day, Burrow gets a gleam in his eye about beating up Queen. “I came out with a couple of bruises on my face, but I bruise really easily,” he says. “If it had been just me and PQ, I think I had him.”
Would Queen agree with that assessment?
“No way,” Burrow says with a big smile. “He’d never give me that.”
It didn’t matter whether he won the fight or not. Burrow had won the team. Teammates still laugh about the powerful visual of him afterward, pacing and panting, boiling hot, as coaches tell them how unacceptable it is to be fighting. “Nah, f— that,” Burrow yells at them. “I don’t want to hear that.”
Burrow leaves practice that day with Moffitt, his strength and conditioning buddy from the previous spring, and he’s a big bloody mess. “It looked like Joe had been to a gang fight and his gang didn’t show up,” Moffitt says. “He was making a point that the defense wasn’t going to bully the offense, and that if you tried, you had to answer to me.”
But Burrow’s thick-skinned personality is perfect for that type of friction. The offense-defense grudge could have lingered for weeks, months, maybe even the entire season. But Burrow made it clear that everybody needed to move on — including him and Queen — and show up the next practice with the thermometer at room temperature.
That doesn’t mean the tension disappeared, of course. The LSU defense spent the entire offseason getting absolutely sauteed by a Burrow offense that was on a rocket ship trajectory. Burrow, Edwards-Helaire, Jefferson and Chase had taken giant leaps forward, and LSU had added red-hot coaching prospect Joe Brady (now with the Bills) as the passing game coordinator. “We might be special,” Burrow started telling people.
In June 2019, Burrow went out to California to work with renowned QB guru Jordan Palmer. A group of former Palmer proteges — namely Josh Allen and Sam Darnold — had rented a house on the beach and were working out with Palmer. Burrow received an invite after Orgeron ran into Palmer at the NFL draft and jokingly poked Orgeron about how many first-round defensive picks he had … but no quarterbacks.
“You won’t win a national title until you’re sitting in the green room with a quarterback,” Palmer said.
Orgeron had fired back, “We have a guy right now who’s going to need a green room.” He was talking about Burrow, who Palmer hadn’t seen much of. But he said he’d love for him to come on out to visit.
One night at the camp, Palmer had everybody go around a small bonfire and describe their journey. He loves to have players tell where they came from, where they are now and where they want to go. He thinks that having a confident story about yourself is a key chunk of manifesting what you want to be when you grow up.
When it was Burrow’s turn, he talked about growing up in Ohio, going to Ohio State, the frustration of rotting on the bench, transferring to LSU, and he ended by saying, “I think we’re going to be almost impossible to stop.”
Palmer remembers exchanging a look with Allen, who later told him, “I hope that guy can throw it because those were some strong statements.”
Burrow could throw it. He was impressive all week, and Palmer, Allen and everybody else began to get on Burrow’s wavelength. They all quickly understood that Burrow is assertive, not cocky, and by the second or third day, Burrow was one of the Palmer guys.
That summer, Jimmy Burrow went to a LSU practice and even he was astounded at how ascendant his son and the offense had become. “Dad, we’re really good on defense,” Joe says, “and they can’t do anything against us.
“We’re going to have a big year.”
AFTER A 55-3 WIN against Georgia Southern in the season opener, LSU was headed to No. 9 Texas for a difficult September road test. With a raucous crowd, Burrow is lights out, and LSU leads for the bulk of the game. But up 37-31 with less than three minutes left in the fourth, LSU has a third-and-17 where the offensive coaches struggle to make the call.
The smart play is to run Edwards-Helaire into the line, get 6 yards, bleed some clock and punt. The coaches go back and forth before just deciding to put the biggest play of the game into Burrow’s hands. Ensminger calls four vertical routes, Aycock signals it in and Orgeron takes his headset off and says to Ensminger, “Are you sure about this?” Ensminger nods yes, and Burrow makes some magic.
As the pocket collapses on him, Burrow strides forward and throws off balance to Jefferson, who catches it and runs 61 yards for the death blow in a 45-38 LSU win.
The magic had been uncorked. LSU romps to a college football record seven wins against top-10 teams. Burrow throws for 5,000 yards and sets an NCAA record with 60 passing touchdowns and 65 total scores. Burrow had become Joe Burr, Joe Brrr, Joe Burreaux, Joe Scheisty and a slew of other nicknames. By halfway through the season, Burrow couldn’t even walk into the team facility without getting hounded by fans and memorabilia hunters. Ponamsky requested a campus police officer for the front of the building, then had to ask for a second blockade at the rear entrance once fans cracked the code.
It was full-fledged Burrow-mania.
By the time the College Football Playoff rolled around, Burrow had become as A-list as a college football player can be in the modern era. He paired a ridiculous on-field presence with the Joe Brrr cocktail of fashion, cigars and coolness. Multiple people interviewed for this story still skip right past how he mowed through Oklahoma (63-28) and then Clemson (42-25) to win the national title. Instead, they talk about Burrow’s performance in a Christmas Day basketball challenge against the Sooners before the game.
In a horse-style matchup where select players had to move back and forth between shooting from the free-throw line and the 3-point line, LSU put Burrow last. He’d been a very good high school basketball player, but OU had such a big lead heading into Burrow’s turn that the challenge was basically over. Everybody was just hoping Burrow could make it close.
In 30 seconds, going from the foul line back to the 3-point line, Burrow had to make 9 shots — which meant he had to go 9-for-9 because most players were only able to get off about 9 shots. Burrow makes a free throw, then a 3, then another free throw, then another 3, and suddenly LSU has a chance. Burrow posts the biggest round of any player, sinking 4 of 6 free throws and a silly 6-of-6 from 3-point range as teammates go wild. LSU had won the game before the playoff, then easily won the actual CFP games for an unprecedented 15-0 season that many Tiger fans will talk about 50 years from now.
But the moments the players and coaches will always remember happened a month before, during Burrow’s obvious Heisman Trophy win. The school had booked a private jet for coaches and family to meet Burrow in New York City ahead of the festivities.
But when Ponamsky showed Burrow who all was coming, he noticed that his guy, Munoz, wasn’t on the list. He told Ponamsky that Munoz should have a seat on the plane. “I couldn’t have done it without both of you,” Burrow said.
Burrow won that night by an unprecedented — maybe unbreakable — 1,846 points and he still remembers looking out at the Ohio State coaches, there to support finalist Justin Fields, and feeling both appreciation for them and also extreme happiness that they got to stare up at their former backup QB holding a very heavy bronze trophy. “I think it was pretty vindicating for people like Derek, Jorge and Coach O, who took a pretty big chance on me,” Burrow says.
“It was a vindicating weekend for a lot of people, including me.”
After Burrow’s Heisman speech, coaches and family took photos with him. He posed for one with Munoz, who expressed his gratitude at being invited. Then Burrow took one with Ponamsky.
Burrow put his arm around him, smiled and said, “Tell your wife we won the f—ing Heisman.”
