Kendell Beckwith’s phone lit up every morning.
A familiar name appeared on the screen, and the same conversation ensued.
“Well, what you gonna do, man?”
The voice belonged to Tre’Davious White—Beckwith’s good friend, LSU football teammate and fellow defensive standout—and the question was about the NFL draft. Would Beckwith go, or would he return for a swan-song season at LSU?
More times than not, Beckwith didn’t have an answer for his buddy. So he’d pose the question right back to White.
“We’d talk every single day for hours at a time—I mean: Every. Single. Day,” Beckwith says. “One day he’d be like, ‘Man, let’s just go ahead on [to the NFL].’ And I’d say, ‘I’m just not ready to leave.’ The next day, he’d call me and say, ‘I think I’m just gonna go ahead and stay.’ And I would be calling him to tell him we should go. It was just back and forth, back and forth.”
Ultimately, both highly touted prospects would make the decision to stay in Baton Rouge for their senior seasons, along with a handful of others who also could have opted for a professional paycheck.
It wasn’t an easy choice, but the collective decision of the senior class to come back for a final stint this fall has been a monumental verdict, made with one overlying goal in mind: Bring a championship back to Baton Rouge.
“That’s something that I told myself when I first came here that I wanted to get,” says senior defensive lineman Christian LaCouture, who also chose to forego the NFL draft this year to return to school. “Coming to LSU, with a team like this, and playing in the conference that we are … you’re always going to have a chance to compete for a national championship. This is my last go-round, and I want to make sure that happens. There’s not going to be any regrets whatsoever.”
This group of seniors has helped build what might be the most highly anticipated season in the Les Miles era. They also may have changed the culture of a program that proudly puts players into the NFL—despite suffering consequences on the collegiate level because of it.
Things couldn’t have been going much better for the LSU football program.
The Tigers were 7-0, ranked No. 2 in the country, and Leonard Fournette was the easy front-runner in the Heisman race heading into the tail end of the season.
The LSU hype train was chugging right along. That is, until Nov. 7, when it all came to a screeching halt in Tuscaloosa.
The 30-16 loss at the hands of Alabama’s Crimson Tide was just the beginning of a slippery slope that eventually spiraled LSU to one of its lowest points in Miles’ tenure.
The Tigers went on to suffer its first three-game losing streak in this millennium. After spending six years in the top 25, they were dropped out of the rankings for the second time in two seasons. Fournette didn’t get an invite to the Heisman ceremony in New York. All hopes of a national, conference or even division title were gone, and somebody had to be the scapegoat.
That somebody was Miles.
Rumors swirled regarding Miles’ future as head coach. He was pegged as a dead man walking, with some media outlets reporting a “0% chance” he would be back in Baton Rouge next season.
High school recruits began questioning their commitment to the Tigers, leaving all aspects of the program’s outlook hanging in the balance.
“That was a feeling that I hadn’t had in a long time,” LaCouture says. “People on the outside are saying a lot of bad things about our football team. But it’s a family around here. We’re family, and you’ve got to stick with your family at all times no matter what [the problem] is.”
The team faced one remaining game against division rival Texas A&M, and a fourth straight loss could have sent the Tigers tumbling even further into football oblivion.
Instead, Miles found himself being carried off the field on the shoulders of his players—including that particular group of upperclassmen—following a 19-7 win against the Aggies.
“We definitely had some ups and downs,” offensive lineman Ethan Pocic says, reflecting on the difficult latter part of the past season. “Sometimes that’s just how it goes—that’s life and that’s football. You just learn from it and take it one day and one game at a time. Sometimes you just need to get back to the basics and start having fun again.”
After the win over the Aggies, things began looking up again. The victory, combined with some behind-the-scenes conversations, led Athletic Director Joe Alleva to declare Miles’ job secure again—and the Tigers had taken their first step back in the right direction.
“We had Coach Miles’ back 110%,” LaCouture says. “We weren’t listening to the media. We knew what was best. He’s the leader of our football team, and we expect him to be here for the long haul.”
As the dust finally began to settle, and LSU prepared for its bowl game against Texas Tech, new questions were already arising.
What changes would Miles make? Could he still sign a strong recruiting class, despite his shaky job security? Would any seniors stick around after the drama of this season?
The coming weeks would be some of the most crucial for the program’s future.
There really is no place like home.
So it makes sense that that’s where all the draft-eligible juniors ended up after breezing through their bowl game.
After a 56-27 stomping of Texas Tech in the AdvoCare V100 Texas Bowl, it was time to think about their looming big decision. Pocic went back up north to his hometown of Chicago, where at first he tried to avoid thinking about the draft.
“I saw all my old friends from back home, and I didn’t really think about it,” he says. “I was just kind of hanging out. After about two or three days, I really had to start thinking about it.”
Beckwith also went north—well, relatively—up to Clinton, Louisiana, to be with his families.
Plural. Beckwith talked with his parents and siblings, of course, but he may have spent the most time with the four horses he calls his “children.” The two females are Coco Chanel and Vicki Mari, and the two male studs are Rozay and Rambo.
The place where Beckwith’s horses roam is his happy place. It’s where he finds peace. Where he can be alone with his thoughts.
He tried to implement the same strategy Pocic did and put the thought off as long as possible, hoping the right answer would just come to him through some sign or symbol. But it was never quite that easy.
“I tried to relax, but it was the most stressed-out I’ve been in my entire life,” Beckwith says. “My mind was just running, and I was not knowing what I wanted to do. I was just trying to weigh out the pros and cons of both sides. [It was] absolutely the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life.”
The same likely goes for all the rising seniors during this process. And with less than two weeks until the mid-January deadline to declare for the NFL Draft, the pressure was building as decision day approached.
For some, the decision was a practical one.
Pocic knew his hip wasn’t 100 percent. A nagging injury lingered throughout the 2015 season and eventually forced him into surgery in early 2016, keeping him out of spring practice. He could play through it for now, but it would affect him down the line, especially in the bigger, stronger and meaner trenches of the NFL.
His draft grades came back sporadically. Some teams loved him; some were skeptical. When the hip issues lingered, and he and his doctors decided surgery was the best option, Pocic had his answer.
“Before anyone knew I had hip problems, some teams were high on me and some teams were low on me,” Pocic says. “It was too spread across the board. It wasn’t a solid grade. I really feel like it just wasn’t meant to be with the hip and with what we can do this year. The hip thing was kind of like the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
For others, it was a business decision.
LaCouture broke his arm in the bowl game, meaning his draft stock—which still stood pretty high, regardless—would take a hit. For guidance, he consulted other former LSU defensive linemen like Barkevious Mingo, Benny Logan and Michael Brockers, each of whom had been through this process before.
“All those guys were telling me the NFL is always going to be there,” LaCouture says. “It’s not going away. You always want to listen to those guys, because they’ve been there, they’ve done that, and they always give you good advice. I can get my degree, I can get a national championship, I can get my arm better, I can heal. I can get ready with this team to help them out.”
For a few, it was pride.
Beckwith received some pretty high draft grades overall. Scouts dubbed him as a second-round pick, third-rounder at worst. That’s some pretty good money in the NFL.
But Beckwith knew he could do better. And he wanted to prove it, more to himself than anybody else.
“They said the worst I could do would be a third-rounder,” Beckwith says. “I feel like I can do better than that. I don’t want to chance it. I just wasn’t ready to leave. I feel like I haven’t done anything yet at LSU. I haven’t left my mark.”
And as much as this group of seniors has already accomplished in its three years here, they believe they’re only just getting started.
It wasn’t ever really a problem during the first half of Miles’ tenure at LSU. Only three underclassmen declared early for the NFL draft in the Mad Hatter’s first six seasons at the helm.
Miles saw that number rise in the next two seasons, with five players leaving early, then double in 2013 when 10 juniors decided to turn pro a year early. Seven left early in 2014 and three more in 2015.
This isn’t all a bad thing. LSU boasted the most players on NFL Week One rosters at the start of last football season—a stat that could bring the team even more attention among both young recruits and national TV audiences—with 40 players, edging Miami (37), USC (35), Alabama and Georgia (both 34).
But for the Tigers’ production on the college level, the loss of so many upperclassmen meant underclassmen would be forced to play big roles early.
LSU has been littered with talent nearly every season under Miles, but the lack of senior leadership could be the biggest factor that has kept the Tigers from title territory in recent years.
“We’ve seen it since we’ve been here—guys leaving just to leave,” Beckwith says. “They get a lower draft grade, and they still leave just to chance it.”
This year’s group of seniors wanted to transform that culture into a more positive atmosphere and try to set a precedent for classes to come.
Offensive tackle Jerald Hawkins ended up being the lone Tiger to declare for this year’s draft, but even he has already spent four years on campus, only deciding to skip on a granted fifth year of eligibility.
Beckwith, Pocic, LaCouture, White, Lewis Neal and Travin Dural all had more than ample opportunities to go pro, yet all turned them down to stay at LSU.
Getting such strong upperclassmen to stay for their senior years might in fact be Miles’ best recruiting effort of his career.
That’s saying a lot considering he also somehow managed to haul in one of the nation’s top freshman classes this year, despite the questions surrounding the program.
The state of LSU football as it stands heading into the 2016 season is something most Tigers fans couldn’t have dreamed up. By last year’s Thanksgiving, the Tigers had lost three straight games, and Miles’ career teetered on a razor’s edge as the team sank to arguably one of its lowest points in more than a decade.
But the Tigers came back with a roar to win the final two games of the season, beating Texas A&M and pummeling Texas Tech in the Texas Bowl.
LSU now looks to return 18 starters from last year’s squad that finished 9-3 and could have likely posted another 10-win season, had the McNeese State game not been cancelled. The team knows the amount of talent it has at its disposal and wants to put it to good use.
Early predictions have the Tigers listed in the preseason Top 10, according to experts from ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Fox Sports, CBS Sports and 247Sports, among many others.
Vegas sportsbooks give LSU 14-1 odds to win the national championship—eighth best in the country—and also have Fournette as the front-runner to take home the Heisman, with 9-2 odds.
“We’re trying to go out on top,” Beckwith says. “We’ve got a lot of talent on this team. The big thing is just trying to use all the talent that we have. Knowing what this football team is capable of and knowing the experience we have coming back this season, I feel like the sky is the limit for us.”
