Before Joe Burrow was LSU’s star quarterback, the 2019 Heisman Trophy winner or preparing to lead the No. 1 team in the College Football Playoff, he was a four-star recruit labeled the eighth best quarterback of the 2015 class. He received a lot of offers — Boston College, Minnesota, Kentucky, Iowa State and Cincinnati among them — and started his college career with Ohio State, the best team to recruit him.
But, as Burrow explained Tuesday during one of the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl press conferences, what he considers his first “real” offer came out of East Carolina after he was recruited by none other than Lincoln Riley, now Oklahoma’s head coach.
His dad, Jimmy Burrow, was the defensive coordinator at Ohio at the time, and the Bobcats were the first team to offer him a scholarship. So Burrow doesn’t really count that. And then came Riley, who was East Carolina’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach from 2010 to 2014 before joining the Sooners.
Burrow explained, via ASAP Sports:
“[S]o my only offer at the time was my dad’s team, and I didn’t really think that was a real offer. I thought it was just my dad’s team just throwing an offer out there.
And Coach Riley called me and offered me a couple months later. So I’ve always had a bunch of respect for him. I was actually really impressed with him on the phone very early. I didn’t really want to go to East Carolina, but I thought about it because of Coach Riley.
He’s a great coach. You can see that the last couple of years.”
Of course, Burrow ended up at Ohio State before transferring to LSU in 2018. And after a mediocre first season with the Tigers, he exploded in 2019 and enters the College Football Playoff with a 77.9 completion percentage, 4,715 passing yards and 48 touchdowns compared with six interceptions.
Burrow and LSU play Riley’s Sooners in the Peach Bowl on Saturday at 4 p.m. ET.
