Special Teams improvement? Hello? Anybody???
To me the weakest unit of Brian Kelly’s LSU tenure has by far been special teams. The offense has obviously been great, the defense—though awful in 2023—was pretty good in 2022, but the special teams has been flat out bad through two years and there’s a chance the 2024 unit isn’t much better.
I need to retract my previous statement about LSU’s special teams being “flat out bad” because Damian Ramos has turned into a pretty reliable kicker for LSU the past two seasons. He may not have the leg strength that Cade York does, but in two years Ramos has made his kicks at a 75 percent clip and he’s currently riding a streak of 89 successful PATs, good for the fifth longest streak in program history. Waiting in the wings is incoming true freshman Aeron Burrell who was viewed as one of the top kicking prospects in the 2024 class. Ramos will likely handle kicks for the next two years and Burrell ought to inherit the job for the 2026 season.
Early on in 2023 Ramos got some run as LSU’s kickoff specialist but eventually the job was taken by redshirt junior Nathan Diebert. Diebert has a stronger leg than Ramos but he struggles with accuracy as he had two kickoffs go out of bounds last season. Thinking out loud here: could Slade Nagle call on Diebert to try the 50+ yard field goals? If Ramos has shown he’s got a limit to his range maybe it’s worth giving Diebert a chance to bomb one in from longer distances.
Slade Roy will once again handle long snapping duties for his senior season. Will he get drafted like the Ferguson brothers? Maybe, maybe not but I know Roy’s been doing his job the past two years because I haven’t seen a single snap miscue.
Punter is where things could get a little dicy for LSU in 2024. Somehow, someway Ed Orgeron and previous coaching staff might have committed one of the greatest sins in football: missing on a punter.
We’re heading into year four and so far I’ve attempted as many punts for LSU as Peyton Todd has in his career. The former No. 1 punting prospect in his class still hasn’t taken a punt for LSU and Brian Kelly and his staff had to dip into the portal to bring in a transfer punter for the second time.
I can understand Jay Bramblett following Kelly to LSU. That was his head coach for multiple years at Notre Dame, he had a chance to punt in the best conference in America, and he ultimately won that job and did it well for two years. But now LSU is welcoming Louisiana Tech transfer Blake Ochsendorff who is entering his seventh season of college football. Ochsendorff began his career at the D-II level, before transferring to Eastern Michigan. He spent the 2020-2022 there—though he never punted once for EMU—before moving down to Ruston where he earned All C-USA honors in 2023. Ochsendorff was one of the best punters in America last season as he led Conference-USA and finished 16th nationally in punting average with 45.7 yards a kick. He had 17 punts go for 50 yards or more and his best was a 70-yarder against Jacksonville State.
So LSU has options at punter, the problem is neither Todd nor Ochsendorff seem to be seizing the job during this fall camp and it’s starting to become a problem for Kelly.
“At the punting position I think that we’ve got two guys that, you know in some ways, compliment each other and I think that they both can help us.” Kelly said this week. “We just have to find out in what realm.”
“I think what stands out to me right now is we need to get consistency. We’ll see a couple of incredibly big kicks and then we’ll see one that is certainly not effective enough. We’ll let those guys continue to challenge each other. But I think it’s going to sort itself out. If we gotta play ‘em both we’ll play ‘em both if that’s what ends up happening.”
We’ve been burned by punt returns in each of the past two seasons so I won’t even bother speculating. Malik Nabers of course had the punt return job taken after muffing a pair against Florida State in the 2022 opener; Aaron Anderson muffed the one and only punt he took in last season’s opener against the Noles. Zavion Thomas was a freshman All-American returner for Mississippi State in 2022 so I’m expecting him to step on a landmine or something when LSU kicks things off against USC in two weeks.
Kaleb Jackson proved to be a pretty solid kick returner in 2023. He had a 30-yard return against Missouri and a 60-yarder against Auburn.