Week after week, LSU football coach Les Miles and his players have been hounded with questions about the team’s ineptness at the quarterback position.
And week after week, they’ve dodged questions on the topic because the No. 12 Tigers claimed it wasn’t an issue with a perfect record still intact.
Those times have come and gone following last weekend’s loss to then-No. 4 Auburn, leaving Miles to scratch his head trying to pinpoint the quarterback woes.
Junior quarterback Jordan Jefferson is in his third year under Miles and offensive coordinator Gary Crowton, while junior quarterback Jarrett Lee is halfway through his fourth year in LSU’s system.
But the seven years of experience between the two have yet to come to fruition as the combined forces of Jefferson and Lee rank LSU 113th offensively out of 120 Football Bowl Subdivision teams with 138.8 passing yards per game. Of the seven teams behind LSU, four are triple option-style offenses — Air Force, Navy, Georgia Tech and Army.
“That’s a tough question,” Miles said when asked about why the two have yet to have success. “The only thing I can tell you is that they’ve been coached and coached and coached.”
The coaching Miles referred to has yet to pay off, especially for Jefferson, who began the year as the starter before handing off part-time duties to Lee for the past four games.
Jefferson hasn’t thrown a touchdown pass since the season opener against North Carolina and has thrown eight interceptions in eight games so far this season. His quarterback rating of 87.7 ranks him second to last of qualified quarterbacks in all of FBS — only Akron quarterback Patrick Nicely has a worse quarterback rating (86.4).
Jefferson said he would prefer to play the entire game but squandered that opportunity after struggling to break 100 yards passing in three straight games as a starter.
Now he spends nearly half the game on the sidelines when Lee is in charge.
“The hardest thing about splitting with another quarterback is that you always don’t have that momentum that you would tend to have,” Jefferson said.
Lee has been slightly better, starting out strong in his first two games against Tennessee and Florida. But he has failed to throw for more than 75 yards in each of the previous two games.
“It is [frustrating], but what can we do?” junior running back Stevan Ridley said of the quarterback situation. “We don’t have another quarterback to throw in there. That’s why we have to roll with both of them. We can’t just say the heck with them and get somebody else. This is our team.”
However, Jefferson has responded fairly well to the two-quarterback system.
Miles and Crowton have simplified Jefferson’s attack, relegating most of his work to short passes and zone reads.
His passing statistics have regressed, but he continues to do most of his damage on the ground. Jefferson has rushed for 192 yards and four touchdowns in the past four games, giving the Tigers another playmaker out of the backfield.
“A lot of people want to bash his throwing and stuff like that, but that makes Jordan our quarterback,” Ridley said. “To have somebody that can be a dual-threat quarterback, we need that on the field.”
Miles and his staff have to go back to the drawing board now, as they have a week and a half to prepare Jefferson and Lee for a showdown with Alabama next weekend in Tiger Stadium.
With only four games left, the window is slowly closing for the two quarterbacks, although Miles believes there is still a lot left to be desired.
“I guess just for me, I just expect at some point in time this thing is going to take off,” he said.
 
 
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Contact Sean Isabella at [email protected]