BATON ROUGE, La. — Somewhere in between the obvious and the unspoken, Jay Johnson closed his eyes, grimaced for a moment and provided a non-answer that told more than anyone understood. In the moments after LSU baseball’s heartbreaking extra-inning loss to Southern Miss in the Hattiesburg Regional final in June, Johnson was asked how he’d fix this struggling LSU pitching staff, how he’d close the gap as an uber-talented blue-blood program with consistent issues on the mound.

Advertisement

The two LSU players sitting next to him immediately turned to watch Johnson closely. They wanted to know, too.

“I respect the question,” a defeated Johnson said, “but I’m not going to answer it right now. I have work to do.”

What we didn’t know was how literally he meant that in ways that are unique to the era of college baseball Johnson now lives in. He did have work to do, as in he immediately moved on from the crushing loss and picked up the phone to call two-time All-American pitcher Paul Skenes, who had entered the transfer portal that weekend after his Air Force team was eliminated in the Austin Regional.

He called NC State’s Tommy White, the National Freshman of the Year nicknamed “Tommy Tanks” for his prodigious home runs. He called UCLA’s stud pitcher Thatcher Hurd. He called Vanderbilt pitcher Christian Little and VCU infielder Ben Nippolt.

He got ’em all.

Four Tigers Named to @USAGoldenSpikes Award Watch List!

🔗

— LSU Baseball (@LSUbaseball) February 10, 2023

College baseball, like most collegiate sports, is entering a brand new era of transfers and NIL deals, and no team took better advantage of the changing landscape than LSU, ranked No. 1 in virtually every preseason poll. Johnson has created what some call the first “Super Team,” taking an already talented LSU program that owns the biggest brand in the sport and adding a ridiculous collection of major-league prospects and rising stars.

The Tigers open their season Friday against Western Michigan with “by far the most hype, the highest expectations” of any team in program history, according to longtime sports information director Bill Franques. And that is saying something at a school that has won six national titles. It’s a team that already returned expected 2024 No. 1 overall draft pick Dylan Crews, preseason All-American first baseman Tre Morgan and the No. 1 high school recruiting class in the country, per Perfect Game. And then it hired away Minnesota Twins revered pitching coach Wes Johnson in the middle of the MLB season. Oh, it also added the most talented transfer class in the history of the sport.

Advertisement

And it’s ruffling feathers. In The Athletic’s college baseball coaches forum, multiple prominent coaches lamented the way NIL and immediate-eligible transfers have affected the top of the sport.

“It is affecting college baseball,” Oklahoma State coach Josh Holliday said. “You don’t have to look any further than look at the preseason rankings and you can figure it out.”

“I am not going to specifically talk about teams,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said. “There is a reason why certain people show up in certain places, and I don’t think that would happen without money.”

When asked about the place of NIL in college baseball, Johnson thinks about how to answer this complex question. He is a grinder, a program builder who made his bones transforming San Diego into a national power as an assistant and then achieving big things at Nevada and Arizona as head coach. Long Beach State coach Eric Valenzuela talked of walking into Johnson’s old apartment in San Diego and seeing no furniture, only a white board filled with recruiting names and plans.

Johnson feels perfectly built for this era in which a head coach is also a general manager, but he shrugs off that concept.

“I don’t know if there’s anything about the era that ‘excites’ me,” Johnson told The Athletic. “I think what I would say is I’ve never really given much thought to whether I like or dislike the way something is. It’s more, ‘Tell me what the rules are. Tell me what the parameters are, and we have to figure out the best way to build our team within those parameters.’ So I guess you could say we’ve embraced the new way.”

Then, he was asked if NIL could be especially well-suited to college baseball.

“I don’t think anybody in the country at any school is going to choose a school for an amount of money given in college baseball, and frankly, it’s an NCAA violation to offer an NIL deal as a recruiting inducement …

“And I’m not into committing NCAA violations.”

Johnson does believe LSU had a head start on how to capitalize in these times. When he was hired in the summer of 2021 after a six-year run at Arizona, Johnson took over for a Hall of Fame coach in Paul Mainieri but inherited a roster with very little pitching and several holes in the lineup.

Advertisement

It was the first summer in which players could transfer without sitting out a year, and LSU aggressively bolstered its roster. He brought over his All-American infielder Jacob Berry from Arizona in addition to Arizona pitchers Riley Cooper and Bryce Collin as well as San Francisco’s Eric Reyzelman and Samford’s Tyler McManus.

“The summer of ’21 was eye-opening in terms of how the portal would really impact college baseball,” he said. “I would just say blatantly: If we did not bring in the five players we did for ’22, we wouldn’t have won 40 games.”

So by the time Johnson entered the 2022 offseason, he understood how to land players in the portal and also how it can instantaneously change a program.

“Then, it was more of a process of, ‘OK, we needed those guys for survival in 2022. Now, how can we compete, really compete, to get back to Omaha?’”

Elevating the starting pitching was the priority. Insert Skenes, Hurd, Little and junior college transfer Nate Ackenhausen plus all of the high school signees. Skenes is a special talent, the No. 4 overall prospect for the 2023 MLB Draft, according to MLB Pipeline. He immediately gives LSU one of the top aces in the country. But Hurd is no slouch, posting a 1.06 ERA in 34 innings last spring at UCLA. LSU went from a makeshift starting rotation that struggled to compete in the SEC to now having arguably the nation’s deepest collection of arms. It’s at the point that LSU just found out standout freshman Grant Taylor is out for the season — and it’s not time to panic.

Last year’s LSU team was an offensive juggernaut that won close games and could scrap it together with the best of them. But too often, the starting pitching doomed the Tigers.

“Hopefully we play 70 games, and we’re going to be in all 70 games,” Johnson said. “I don’t see a game getting away from us, and that’s exciting.”

Advertisement

The most exciting transfer, at least to the fans, might be White, who hit 27 home runs at NC State last year and will help fill the production lost by the departures of Berry and Cade Doughty. Crews and White should form the top hitting duo in the country, and LSU still has a preseason All-American in Morgan, a highly touted freshman prospect in Paxton Kling and returning producers such as Josh Pearson, Gavin Dugas and Cade Beloso. The lineup has a chance to be special.

“Dylan Crews is one of the better hitters (in the country),” Vanderbilt’s Corbin said. “I thought (former LSU shortstop Alex) Bregman was an outstanding hitter. And Crews is every bit of that as a hitter, with strength.”

But it wasn’t just about roster acquisitions. Johnson also spent his first real offseason doing some self-inventory on what LSU baseball needed. His two main assistants, Dan Fitzgerald and Jason Kelly, left for head coaching jobs at Kansas and Washington, respectively.

That meant an opportunity for change.

“I have a year under my belt now,” he thought to himself then, “and now I have a better understanding of what we need to do here to compete at the top in 2023. And that may sound odd to say because LSU has been such a historical program, but the landscape of winning at the top has changed.

“It was actually kind of exciting.”

He replaced Fitzgerald with Duke hitting coach Josh Jordan, the 2018 ABCA/Baseball America Assistant Coach of the Year. But it was the hire of Wes Johnson from the Twins that might have the biggest impact. Johnson built elite pitching staffs at Dallas Baptist, Mississippi State and Arkansas before helping the Twins climb into first place in the AL Central before his decision to leave midseason.

Skenes cited Wes Johnson as one of the primary reasons he chose LSU as perhaps the most highly coveted transfer last offseason.

Advertisement

“Being able to talk to him about pitching and develop professionally, it’s been a huge blessing,” Skenes told reporters this week. “You can see it on the mound and understand what makes me a good pitcher. I’m a guy that wants to know the how and the why and not just the what. I’ll ask him a lot about the details of pitch design and what makes my stuff good.”

That’s the piece of this that Jay Johnson wishes was out there when people talk about his Super Team. He doesn’t think there’s any world in which NIL money can compete with MLB money. And while Johnson said LSU has never facilitated NIL deals as a recruiting inducement, LSU athletics sources told The Athletic that many of the big-name transfers do have well-paying NIL deals, either with LSU’s collective or other businesses.

But for all the talk of this offseason, now Johnson has to build a winner with this loaded roster. His first season had built-in excuses. Those are gone.

Johnson understands LSU’s proud baseball history and references previous teams as examples for his talented club. He talks of sacrifice and mental toughness and putting the team above your own accolades. He mentioned Warren Morris redshirting in 1993 and going on to hit the most famous home run in college baseball history to win the 1996 College World Series. He referenced Mainieri’s 2009 squad that had future major leaguers such as Austin Nola and Mikie Mahtook starting the season on the bench. Then, when they took starting roles, some veterans — most notably Leon Landry — lost their spots but still were among the first leaping on the pile in Omaha.

That’s what this team will need to win.

“Now, so far so good,” Johnson said, “but we haven’t been hit with a ton of thunderbolts yet, and that’s when it will really be tested.”

(Photo of Dylan Crews courtesy of LSU Athletics)