LSU wide receiver Malik Nabers made headlines for the wrong reasons last month with an arrest in New Orleans, but his head coach made sure to paint a different picture.
The junior wide receiver won't face charges for the arrest during the parade season. He made a poor decision, but as his team continues to prepare for the upcoming football season, he's making all the right ones.
"He’s made some poor choices, but yet he makes great choices on a day-to-day basis," Kelly said as his team kicked off the second set of spring practices this week. "And that is, he trains hard. He is a guy that, when it comes to his academics, he takes care of those things. He’s a good teammate."
Nabers faced internal discipline for the incident, but was on the field as his team opened spring practice and he isn't expected to miss any games. That's a positive thing for the LSU squad, with the Youngsville native expected to be the top option in a passing attack led by returning Jayden Daniels.
In his sophomore season, Nabers led the team with 72 catches for 1,017 yards, while also adding three touchdowns. His biggest contribution came in the Tigers' Citrus Bowl domination of Purdue, when he logged 9 catches for 163 yards and a touchdown, while also completing a pair of passes for 50 yards and another touchdown.
Nabers has continued his momentum on the field and in the classroom, and he's even a potential candidate to be a team captain, Kelly said.
"He does have those traits in the room, but he’s got to keep doing it," Kelly said. "I don’t know that we’re passing out Cs for the shirts right now, but he’s showing those kind of markers where people are starting to look towards things as the leader in that room.”
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NO POSITION CHANGES ... YET
There have been some players switching sides of the ball on the offensive and defensive lines, and some additional players working in at running back early in the spring practices. But those are simply for the sake of having competitive drills with adequate numbers, at this point there are no potential position changes in that regard.
Still, it's not out of the question. And if it does happen, that will likely be as the team tries to find an extra body or two at safety.
"That’ll be an area that we’ll continue to look at, because there are some guys there that could possibly play a couple of different positions," Kelly said. "I don’t know who they and right now and we’ll continue to monitor that."
ON RE-RECRUITING JAYDEN DANIELS
After an outstanding debut season with LSU, it wasn't a guarantee that Jayden Daniels would be back for another season. That changed when he met with his coaches and they laid out a development plan for him with an eye on success at the NFL level.
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"We had to give him a comprehensive plan as to what we were gonna do in the weight room, how we were going to continue to develop him technically as a quarterback, all of those pieces, and then utilizing the resources that we have here.”
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“It was really having a comprehensive year-round training program for him, right here. And then providing him the opportunity to do other things as well. As you know, he went out on the west coast and trained with other elite quarterbacks, providing him the contacts to do that. I think more than anything else it was continuing the development of a quarterback that’s in that stage. And when we were able to meet and he saw that we had a comprehensive plan, I think it helped him make that decision.”
IMPACT OF GETTING MAASON SMITH BACK
The Tigers' ultra-talented defensive tackle has been doing non-contact work early on in spring practices as he works back from a torn ACL suffered in the 2022 season-opener. Kelly didn't lay out any timeline for when he'll be back to full work, but he did rave about the potential impact he'll have when he does get back on the field.
“It’ll be immense. … We had great edge presence last year, it was pretty obvious with Harold [Perkins] and BJ [Ojulari]. But you could fan one side and chip or move the back to the other because we didn’t have a great inside pass rush presence." Kelly said. "Now you put Maason to the inside. If [opponents] do that this year, I don’t know how many sacks he’ll have. You can’t single block him. We couldn’t. So when you start to … move the center to him, or use the back inside. Now you’re going to leave our edge players 1-on-1 and we’ll have a really good, balanced pass rush. So he brings that presence, which we didn’t have last year.”
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