Unimpeachable performance
Burrow powers LSU to championship game,
ATLANTA— History will little note nor long remember that the 2019 Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl began with a quarterback sack.
Yes, certainly, LSU did play a modicum of defence Saturday in one of the more overwhelming routs in the brief history of the College Football Playoff. But, hey, who celebrates the brakes on the Daytona 500 winner?
It was the Tigers’ turn this day to perform the ceremonial ousting of Oklahoma, and Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow and his supporting cast went about the task with an offensive glee unknown to this stage. They turned up the dial on their fearsome offence past the point-a-minute setting, broke off that knob, and the effect bordered on laughable: A 63-28 victory in a meeting between reputedly two of the game’s top four teams.
Oddsmakers who had established LSU as a 131⁄ point favourite missed the mark by only three touchdowns.
The Tigers will face the Clemson-Ohio State winner in the championship game in New Orleans on Jan. 13.
By halftime, LSU already had scored a dozen more points (49) than it did in the entirety of its SEC championship game victory over Georgia 21 days ago in this same building. Before the half was done, the Tigers already had seven touchdown passes in their account, leaving the Sooners, now 0-4 in the past five years as a playoff team, in a state of shock at the break.
Is there an award higher than the Heisman Trophy? What Burrow did Saturday — 29of-39 for 493 yards passing, seven passing touchdowns, one more touchdown by foot — should be of some interest to the Nobel committee.
And he likely cemented his place as the NFL’s first pick come the draft, if he is not made commissioner before that.
Burrow threw for his seven touchdowns before catching his breath in the second half, and Justin Jefferson caught four of them (both Peach Bowl and New Year’s Six bowl records).
It was, it must be noted, not all touchdowns and jubilation for the Tigers this day.
Just hours before the game, they were broadsided by tragedy when the daughter-in-law of the team’s offensive co-ordinator was killed in a small-plane crash outside Lafayette, La.
A sports broadcaster in that southern Louisiana town, Carley McCord was en route to Atlanta for the Peach Bowl on Saturday morning when the private plane she was in crashed shortly after takeoff from Lafayette Regional Airport. She was among five reportedly killed in the crash. McCord was the wife of Steve Ensminger Jr., son of the Tigers assistant coach of the same name. From the coaches box on high at Mercedes-Benz, the elder Ensminger worked the playoff semifinal that same afternoon.
Ensminger’s offence, which had produced so many peaks this season, somehow found a quite different, even more breathless, altitude Saturday against the Sooners.
“He’s the MVP right now,” LSU head coach Ed Orgeron said of Ensminger during a halftime interview.
The difference between the two teams was spelled out clearly at the beginning. With the first possession of the game, Oklahoma went three-and-out. And, then, following a shanked punt of 23 yards, it was the Tigers’ turn to go threeand-in, with a 19-yard touchdown pass from Burrow to Jefferson.
Four of Burrow’s TD tosses travelled 30 yards or more, including a 62-yard play to Thaddeus Moss, whose father, Minnesota Vikings great Randy Moss, was in attendance.
For the first time in four appearances at Mercedes-Benz — the previous three with Alabama — Oklahoma quarterback Jalen Hurts, the Heisman runner-up to Burrow, experienced a loss. He was 15-of-31 for 217 passing yards with two rushing touchdowns.
Burrow’s day was done early, with 9:39 still to play. LSU was by then a most comfortable semifinalist. All that remained was to identify who next — Clemson or Ohio State — would dare try to drink from the fire hose that is this offence.