The Josh Innes Show - We Should All Admire Garrett Nussmeier

Episode Date: September 3, 2025

This segment started with a discussion about a column about Bill Belichick and UNC not being ready to play in the SEC. First off, whoever thought UNC would be good in the SEC? Second, this leads to a discussion about loyalty. Garrett Nussmeier has waited his turn at LSU and he represents the kind of player we should admire in college sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, let's see here. The headline reads, Bill Belichick and UNC show they are not SEC or Big Ten ready in humiliating debut. I don't know that I needed to see Bill Belichick and UNC get their dicks knocked off by TCU to tell you that they're not SEC ready. When has anyone ever said, you know who should be in the SEC to play football is UNC? I don't know that any humans ever said that. Now, I guess when you form your super conferences, which is really to the detriment of college football, I don't like it. First of all, let me play a couple commercials and then we'll get into it. All right, it's game week, baby, and we are ready for football with Draft King Sportsbook

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a Scotia Bank banking package. Learn more at scotiabank.com slash banking packages. Conditions apply. Scotia Bank, you're richer than you think. So, yeah, let's talk about that. And I know I talk about it on here somewhat frequently. But it's interesting.

Talking about college football, I still love college football. I was glued to the TV last week. I still bet on it a ton. And even though, like, I bitch about LSU and other schools. and the kind of vagabond nature of the athletes and the kind of journeymen, which is vagabond. So now I'm just kind of filling with different words. But when you look at the fact that guys don't seem to have any loyalty, don't really possess any passion for the particular schools they play at,

they're just mercenaries, they're hired guns, guys don't care about the rivalries that you grew up caring about. Like, why would some guy who's played at four schools give a shit about Auburn versus Alabama? Like, let's say Auburn's your fourth school. There is absolutely zero way that you are that invested in Auburn and Bamma. There's no way you're invested in the Iron Bowl. To become invested in something like that, you need to have played in two or three of those and watched your team lose one, win one, and deal with the passion and the pageantry of it. When you've got a bunch of hired guns, there's no way those individual games matter that much.

You know, we at LSU, we hate Alabama. I don't consider Alabama to be their quote-unquote rival because I don't believe that LSU has a quote-unquote rival in the traditional sense. They don't have an Auburn to an Alabama or a North Carolina to a Duke type of thing. But based on how well teams are playing, like when I was growing up in Baton Rouge, like everybody always hated Alabama, but Alabama wasn't all that good. Like they weren't competing for the SEC West. So we really fucking hated Auburn because Auburn was the team that many years it would come down to you or Auburn in the early Tommy Tuberville early 2000s. That's who you'd watch and say, okay, we got to beat them.

And if we lose to them, they're probably going to Atlanta. So we hated them. Then there's manufactured rivalries like Arkansas. Ole Miss is a rivalry. And it's becoming more of that now. I just didn't grow up with that. Like if you grew up in the 70s and the 60s, you probably think LSU Ole Miss is big shit. Well, I grew up in the 90s and 2000s.

And when I was growing up, Coach O was the fucking coach of Ole. or David Cutcliffe was the coach in Ole Miss, and Ole Miss wasn't even relatively competitive outside of Eli Manning, who then fell on his ass and cost them a trip to the SEC championship game, and LSU went. So, to me, it's all, there will never be for an LSU an Iron Bowl scenario, right? But as a fan, you like to think that the players that you recruit to your school care as much about those types of things as you do. In reality, there's no way they can because they are mercenaries.

They're hired guns, right? And that's kind of the current world of college athletics. And I've learned to deal with it, but it sucked some of my joy out of it. It's taken some of the wind out of my sales as a college football fan. So I view it at a view of, hey, I'm here to gamble on this shit, but I know that some guy ain't going to stay. That's what makes something like, someone like Garrett Nussmeyer impressive. Garrett Nussmeyer, and I know that I started this talking about Bill Belichick and super conferences, and I mean, look, nobody thinks that UNC belongs in the fucking SEC, unless there becomes a world where there are two conferences, the Big Ten and the SEC, and you put in, you know, 40 teams in each of them, no one has ever even thought or contemplated the thought that North Carolina belongs in the SEC. North Carolina will never be an elite level football school.

It will never happen. I don't care that Bill Belichick is the coach. I don't care that Mac Brown was the coach. Wherever it was before, Mac Brown, I don't care. It will never. Just like Duke. Duke is fine. And Duke has become a solid mid-level type of football program

that in a given year might win eight games, nine games, whatever. David Cutcliffe, the aforementioned helped build Duke into a solid program, right? But no one thinks of Duke as an SEC school for football. And no one thinks of UNC in that way either. I didn't need to see them get their asses kicked by TCU to know that North Carolina. is never going to be that level of school. Thank you. But when you start talking about one of the things that kind of turns me off about college athletics, it's that dudes bounce around from place to place.

Like, LSU was incredible in the portal this year. And dudes who they picked up in the portal have made major impacts for them already in beating Clemson. But some of the guys, dudes who stuck around for two, three, four years, guys like Harold Perkins who stayed there, those who stay will be champions. Harold Perkins, who has stayed balling out. But really the ultimate example of this, because it's the most high-profile position and you hear about guys relocating all the time in the portal, quarterback.

Look at the guys who are finding success. Like there are some guys who've bounced around from place to place that have found some success early in the season. We talked about Tommy Castellanos at Florida State. He was at Boston College. You know, those kind of things do happen. It's not impossible to go to a new place as a quarterback and find success. but look at Garrett Nussmeyer and maybe I'm just blowing the guy because he's the quarterback of my team but Garrett Nussmire is an example of a dude who stayed somewhere didn't have to super talented

guy could have bounced has had multiple chances to bounce has played behind multiple dudes weighed in his turn that does not happen you don't see that anymore that's why we should want to see guys like this be successful. I'm not telling you to root for LSU. I'm not telling you to be an LSU fan. What I'm telling you is that we should be rooting for guys like Garrett Nussmeyer. We should be rooting for guys like Kade Klubnick, who has stayed. But Garrett Nussmire is a great example of a guy who has had to play behind multiple stars, played behind Jaden Daniels, didn't bitch, waited his turn. Last year got a shot to be the starter, played pretty well, played well enough to get himself into position to be one of the top two or

three guys in terms of Heisman odds to start this year, and played really fucking well against a good Clemson team. Your team's down 10 to three in the second half. You outscore Clemson, 14-0 in the second half. You don't turn the ball over against Clemson on the road, which was a thing that you did last year, like the reason you lost to Texas A&M is your spurs started jingling and jangling a little bit, and you turned the ball over when pressure came, and you blow that game to Texas A&M, and the season goes off the rails. Nussmire was great. Just, again, numbers-wise, you go, cool it through for 230.

Yeah, it's not the sexy 310, but 230 a Tud and no interceptions and big conversions on third downs. Garrett Nussmeyer, baller, okay? And that's the kind of guy we should root for in college athletics because he's the kind of guy. If you told me that Garrett Nussmeyer hates Alabama, I would believe you. And when Garrett Nussmeyer steps up and says something about how we got to go out and we got to beat Alabama, he's lived watching Alabama basically own LSU. Outside of the year with Jaden Daniels, LSU has beaten, what, Alabama twice since Joe Burrow, right?

Well, if you count Joe Burrow in 2019, you won that one. And then at home, you won against Alabama a couple years ago when Jaden Daniels was the quarterback that was in overtime. go forward on the two-point conversion. Outstanding. He knows that really since 2011, when LSU won 9 to 6 over Alabama, they haven't won much at all. Like, it is a difficult, they've won. I think they've won twice since 2011 against Alabama.

But Garrett Nussmeyer is not some guy that LSU just picked up and gave a big NIL deal to to come to town. But previously he played at North Carolina. and before that played at Appalachian State, and before that was a Division 2 Swack School Alcorn. No, this is a dude that has stayed the entire time. And maybe I'm blowing him because he's the LSU quarterback, and maybe I wouldn't feel that way if LSU had gotten blown out. If the score, instead of flipping it in the second half, say they got outscored 14 to nothing

in the second half and lost 24 to 3, maybe I wouldn't be looking at it the same way. But when you talk about the current state of the NCAA and college athletes, and you see guys, some dudes playing at four or five different schools, like, there is no way it is possible for those individuals to feel the same way about your institution that you do. You may have never set foot on campus as a player or a student, but you have a passion for the place you root for. You know the alma mater, even if you didn't fucking go to the school and ever graduate. You know the alma mater.

You know the fight song. You buy all the gear. You travel across the country to see them. That person will never love that school the way you. do. It is impossible. Even if they have one year and they're part of a national championship winning team, they will not have the same type of commitment when you've played at five different places, four different places, three different places. But if you're Garrett Nussmeyer, a kid that's from Lake Charles, Louisiana, a kid that stayed around for four or five years

waiting his turn to play, and now is seeing it and now is being rewarded, those are the kind of stories that still make college football fun. And maybe that's a Pollyanna viewpoint of mind. But when you've got a guy who has been on, like if you look on ESPN and look at Garrett Nussmeyer's career history, it just says LSU Tigers, 2021 to current five seasons. It does not say Garrett Nussmeyer, 2021 to current five seasons and four stops. But there are a lot of people who are. But that's not Garrett Nussmeyer.

And that's why I find him so appealing. That's why I find LSU, at least with him at the helm, so appealing. Look, LSU had to go to the portal to do what they're doing because they've, look, they recruit well. And if you put up a fence around Louisiana, you're going to get good players. But you're also going to lose a ton of good players in the NIL era because like we saw with Bryce Underwood. Bryce Underwood, who's now at Michigan, he's from Michigan, playing at Michigan, now started as a true freshman game one against New Mexico. Homeboy was committed to LSU forever. And then one day the money got too good.

And he said, ah, fuck it, I'm going to Michigan. Like, you're going to lose out on guys. I enjoy the strategy of adding dudes in the portal. I'd argue that adding dudes in the portal is a better strategy than recruiting well. Like, you want to recruit well because it looks sexy when rivals says you have a top five class. How many of those dudes that you recruit and sign on National Signing Day will be there for three or four years? I'm going to guess not many of them. So go out, get money, invest it in dudes that have gone and played successfully at other places.

Like maybe I'm being a hypocrite here because I like guys that stay around for four years, three years, because I feel like they're as committed to the whole thing as I am. But if you look at what you've got with dudes in the portal, you've got established players who have been successful at other places so they can plug and play and be ready to go. You know what you are getting, generally speaking, when you go to the portal. Like, sure, there'll be times that you get a guy. who played at a smaller school and you're taking a flyer like oh this guy went to McNeese State maybe he'll translate to the next level but a lot of times you're getting dudes who played at Florida State played at Auburn played at Alabama and you

know that they can play at a high level so you know what you're getting you're getting your money's worth you don't know if a guy's going to be great when you recruiting when he's 18 so I know it's a little all over the place there my basic gist in this little segment here is that my love for college football's taking a hit because of NIL. Not the dudes are getting paid, but because of constant movement and lack of commitment to

a certain place. It's taking a hit. But guys like Garrett Nussmeyer who we should be rooting for. If we had more of that, I think that more of that passion would exist. But by the way, we're still putting 100,000 people into all these SEC stadiums. So passion smashing. It's clearly there.