We’re getting closer and closer to the start of college football season and that means it is finally time to start previewing the Louisiana Ragin Cajuns and the LSU Tigers.
While we could preview the team as a whole, it’s much more fun to breakdown a team position by position. Without any further pre-amble, let’s get started with this year’s edition of the Cajuns position previews with the most important position in college football: the quarterback.
Departing Players:
The lone departing player for the Cajuns is Jordan Davis. When you look back at his final season wearing the vermillion and white, it was a bit of a mixed bag.
The season started off well enough, but things turned sour after he got injured during the Texas A&M game. From then on, it became a carousel at the position with no real idea who would carry the load as the season progressed.
With Billy Napier taking over the program, it was a clean slate for all the quarterbacks in house and after the spring game, it became clear that maybe he was a step behind and wouldn’t be the starter for his final season. Shortly after the spring game ended, Davis announced his intentions to transfer out of the program.
Returning Players:
While Davis is gone, the quarterback room still has three players that saw significant playing time in 2017 and will all be considered for the starting QB job. Let’s start things off with Levi Lewis, whose redshirt was burned midway through the season and had a solid run, starting three games with his highlight being the ballgame against South Alabama when he went 8-for-15 for 110 yards and two touchdowns. He made a strong case for the starting job back in the spring game, throwing for 275 yards and two touchdowns.
Nunez is another guy that could make a case for himself to be a starting QB in fall camp. With the QB carousel from last season, he started two games with his big highlight being a successful showing against Texas State going 17-for-27 for 232 yards and a score. He had an okay spring game and it might be a bit of an uphill climb for the senior.
The final guy that is returning that saw significant time is Dion Ray, but it was largely in the Wildcat formation. With Napier taking over, he will be a guy that will get reps as a QB during fall camp. He’ll be the wild card in the quarterback position, but don’t be surprised if he follows the route of his teammate in Kadon Harrison and try and put Ray in another position just to get him on the field to get him some experience.
The Other Guys
I didn’t mention Jake Arceneaux, who did see the field last season, but that was largely because he had very few snaps and it wasn’t truly worth it to bring up in terms of a conversation of being named the starter.
You look at the rest of the quarterbacks in the room and Wesley Blazek is the name that many in the Acadiana area should remember from his time with the Teurlings Rebels. He’s a good quarterback that has a chance to make some waves in the depth chart, but I’m not 100 percent on him doing that his freshman year with all the experience coming back from last year.
Overall Thoughts:
The QB position at least seems like a two-horse race with Lewis having an advantage because of his good spring game. However, Nunez will bring the competition down to the wire and that’s a good problem to have considering how difficult the 2018 schedule is after week one.
-Clint Domingue