BATON ROUGE — LSU will begin the on-field preparation for defending its national championship on Saturday as the Tigers open spring practice with a 1 p.m. workout at the Charles McClendon Practice Facility.
The Tigers, who are coming off a 13-1 national championship season in 2003, will conduct 12 practices and three scrimmages over the next six weeks, culminating with the annual spring game at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 24 in Tiger Stadium.
LSU will practice eight times before taking a week off for spring break from April 3-11. The Tigers will resume workouts on April 12 and will practice for two more weeks before concluding spring drills with the spring game.
“We’re looking forward to a good spring practice and obviously we’ve got some goals and objectives of what we’d like to accomplish this spring,” LSU coach Nick Saban told members of the media on Monday. “The number one objective of the spring is to get the best 22 players on the field at every position that we can. If that requires some experimentation in the spring, we’ve done it in the past, now is the time to do those types of things so that we can establish roles for players on the team and get the best players that we have in as many situations as we can.
“This is a people game. So to try to figure out how your people fit in, the best things to do with them and how you can get the best ones out there most often, is probably what spring practice is all about and its something that we certainly want to do.”
The Tigers return 15 starters, six on offense, seven on defense and two specialists, from last year’s team that ranked among the national leaders in statistical categories on both sides of the football.
In addition to the returning starters, LSU returns a total of 41 letterwinners from last year’s squad, including 23 on offense and 15 from a defense that led the nation in both scoring (11.0 points per game) and total defense (252.0 yards per game).
“I think the second thing, which is maybe more important than even the first, is to develop as many young players as possible with the knowledge and experience that we possibly can to hopefully get them to a level where they can assume a larger role on the team,” Saban said. “Maybe they can even become a starter at a position where we have a need. I think even if they don’t become starters, they can become significant contributors in some kind of way to the team. So development of players is really key to me in spring practice and the off-season program.”
The Tigers head into spring drills needing to replace starters at several key positions, including Matt Mauck at quarterback, Michael Clayton and Devery Henderson at wide receiver, Chad Lavalais at defensive tackle, Jack Hunt at safety and Donnie Jones at punter.
“The third thing is that there are areas on the team that everyone knows where we lost someone who was a starter,” Saban said. “For example, we need to come out in the spring and hopefully develop a punter just like last year we were hoping to develop a kicker. There’s always something. You’re team changes dramatically and maybe more dramatically in the future as more and more younger players can go out and leave the program for the draft or whatever it is. There’s always going to be somebody that you have to replace and someone that you have to develop and probably somebody that comes in during the fall as a freshman who has an opportunity to contribute as well in some area like this.”