Louisville QB Jackson better than ever
Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson’s preseason goal was not to recapture the Heisman Trophy, which would have further inked his name into the pages of college football history, but rather a more generic and wider purpose: to win a championship.
There was a time when this seemed possible, if never probable. After losing three in a row to end last season, Louisville entered September viewed, once again, as the third-best team in its own division in the Atlantic Coast Conference, behind Florida State and Clemson. That the possibility existed at all was almost solely a testament to Jackson; he could carry a team with subtle flaws to the doorstep of title contention, went the logic.
Those flaws have been revealed to be more than subtle — the Cardinals defense has been miserable, making that the prime contributor to a season run off the rails by mid- October, while a rickety offensive line and inexperienced receiver corps have occasionally stymied an offense built to score at will. The result has been a 5-3 start, with losses to Clemson, North Carolina State and Boston College eliminating Louisville from any major bowl contention and painting the Cardinals as one of the prime disappointments among the Power Five conferences.
“My biggest goal was to win a national championship. We’ve got three losses, so that got cut short,” Jackson said. “The Clemson game, we didn’t come to play. We come back, go to N.C. State on Thursday, they beat us. And then we come back home and lose to Boston College, and that was just … I don’t know how that even happened. That was rough. I wasn’t expecting that at all.”
Louisville has been erased from the College Football Playoff chase. Jackson’s odds of reclaiming the Heisman have taken a similar hit. There’s no disputing the former; the Cardinals absolutely have fallen short of expectations. The latter — whether Jackson should be a Heisman factor — is more complicated.
On one hand, Jackson and the Cardinals enter Saturday’s matchup vs. Wake Forest with the goal of simply securing bowl eligibility. From there, Louisville’s success in November will dictate the program’s postseason destination, and even a sweep of its final four games will only draw a secondary-bowl appearance. The team results draw a line between Jackson and Penn State’s Saquon Barkley and Oklahoma’s Baker Mayfield, to name two.
But there’s a flaw in that train of thought: Jackson is better than ever. Even as the Cardinals stumble as a team, their quarterback continues to separate himself from the pack with his arms and his legs, with numbers that are again unrivaled and unmatched.
“Yeah, I would say I’m better than last year,” he said. “I mean, there’s still room for improvement as well. There’s some things I feel like I should be working on, like just being a better passer. I like to throw the ball a lot.”
He ranks sixth nationally in passing yards. He’s cut down on his interceptions while still finding success downfield. He’s become more comfortable in the pocket, a byproduct of experience, and improved his ability to recognize and diagnose defenses.
Jackson ranks second among QBs in rushing, trailing Navy’s Zach Abey, and is tied for seventh nationally in rushing scores. All told: Jackson has accounted for a Football Bowl Subdivision-best 3,346 yards of total offense at an average of 418.3 yards per game, exceeding his per-game totals from a season ago.
Yet he’s been overlooked. To cite the Cardinals’ record makes sense, but only to a point — don’t forget that Louisville had three losses at the end of the 2016 regular season, so voters did manage to look past the standings to focus on Jackson’s individual success.
“I really don’t pay attention to what people say, because one minute they want to bring you up, next minute they want to bring you down,” he said. “I don’t really get frustrated, and I don’t really vent to people. I try to keep things to myself.”
It would be only natural to get frustrated. Maybe his community service activities have helped him to remain upbeat: Jackson and several teammates met in August with young cancer patients at a nearby hospital and again on campus, and those interactions have kept things in focus as the Cardinals’ season falls short of expectations.
“It made me want to keep doing it,” Jackson said.
GAMES YOU SHOULDN’T MISS
It’s impossible to watch every game. (I know. I’ve tried.) Until the invention of picture-in-picture-in-picture television technology, I’m here to help. In each time window, here are this Saturday’s games you can’t afford to miss (times Eastern):
Noon: No. 12 Oklahoma State at No. 22 West Virginia (ABC). Beating the Mountaineers on the road would answer some of the questions regarding whether the Cowboys truly belong on the list of college football’s top teams.
3:30 p.m.: No. 2 Penn State at No. 6 Ohio State (Fox). The game of the week has no shortage of story lines. Prime time: Georgia Tech at No. 7 Clemson (8 p.m., ABC or ESPN2). Relatively forgotten after Syracuse handed out their first loss, the Tigers’ steady climb back into a national semifinal begins with a matchup against Paul Johnson and the Yellow Jackets. After dark: No. 21 Southern California at Arizona State (10:45 p.m., ESPN). It would have been hard to imagine a few weeks ago, but the hotter team is ASU — fresh off wins against Washington and Utah — and not the reeling Trojans.