LSU Football: 3-star athlete is hoping to get an offer from the Tigers

LSU football has a huge advantage over most SEC programs when it comes to recruiting.

The Tigers are alone in Louisiana as the only major in-state program, which is something that not many other programs can claim (Missouri and Arkansas also fall in this category, but they don’t have the same amount of talent to pull from).

That means LSU essentially gets first dibs on elite players from Louisiana (though the program has a lost a couple of elite players to rival SEC programs).

This is obviously a great thing for the Tigers. But it also provides some challenges, too.

LSU Football can’t take every good in-state player

LSU clearly wants to land all of the elite players in Louisiana. But there are only so many. After that first tier of elite players, the Tigers have to go outside the state to find elite talent.

That means a lot of talented in-state players don’t receive offers from the Tigers.

This is where things can get tricky. Optics-wise, it’s never a good look to not offer a player from Louisiana, and then that player ends up being a star somewhere else.

LSU is currently in that exact situation with 2022 three-star wide receiver Leroy Paige, a New Orleans native who is ranked as the No. 462 overall player in the country (247Sports composite).

Paige is receiving some interest from power-5 programs (Baylor, Florida State, Mississippi State, Virginia, Kentucky, Memphis, etc), but he’s yet to receive an offer from the Tigers.

And he definitely wants that offer.

“I’d love to have that LSU offer because it would be close to home and there are a lot of positives with that,” said Paige this week (via 247Sports).

Paige is a 6-foot-4 athlete who could play either safety or wide receiver at the next level. He’s a player that I think LSU will eventually offer.

But the fact the Tigers haven’t offered Paige yet just shows us how tough it can be recruiting in Louisiana. There’s a lot of talented in-state players that want an offer from the Tigers. And for a lot of those players, there’s not much of a talent-gap. Ed Orgeron and his staff have to figure out which kids have the ability to excel in the SEC and which kids would be better off at a group-of-five school.

It’s not an easy job, which is why we see two-star and three-star recruits every year that end up playing a key role in the Super Bowl.