Ryan HockensmithOct 13, 2025, 07:30 AM ETCloseRyan Hockensmith is a Penn State graduate who joined ESPN in 2001. He is a survivor of bacterial meningitis, which caused him to have multiple amputation surgeries on his feet. He is a proud advocate for those with disabilities and addiction issues. He covers everything from the NFL and UFC to pizza-chucking and analysis of Tom Cruise’s running ability.Follow on X
The Arizona State transfer has just walked into the indoor practice facility for the first time on a March afternoon in 2022. Chatter had spread that the coaches thought Daniels, a fourth-year junior, could be special. But when he shows up, several LSU players and staff members give each other side-eyes.
“No swag whatsoever,” receiver Malik Nabers says now. “He looked like a kid on his first day of high school.”
At the time, Daniels’ official bio lists him at 6-foot-4, 200 pounds, but he is probably an inch shorter and 25 pounds less than that. He has a backpack that hangs lower than cool kids would ever wear it. His hair is a mess. He’s wearing glasses as he cross-references his printed class schedule against his phone’s calendar. He doesn’t say much. He looks so out of place that one of the LSU assistant coaches sneaks a picture when Daniels isn’t paying attention.
Nabers goes so far as to call Daniels a “weird nerd” to his face, after knowing him for all of two minutes. Some teammates pile on, too, laughing and ribbing Daniels. Assistant coach Sherman Wilson, the guy who takes the picture, tells Daniels he looks like a “bum.”
Most of the banter is good-natured ribbing of the rookie. But some of it is a test. LSU has a culture that has long encouraged players put newcomers through the wringer before an SEC season begins, so they know what level of toughness is needed to succeed. His new teammates keep telling Daniels that life and football are different in the SEC, that his California cool better be ready to grind. He is third on the LSU depth chart, and they let him know he’s entering into the QB battle of his life.
Daniels handles the digs well on the surface, but underneath, he’s hurting. Daniels has always had a warm, calm exterior, and he’s a better listener than any star quarterback needs to be. But he’s at a wobbly point in his life, both as a football player and as a person. His mechanics are a mess — LSU coaches think his feet and his eyes are doing two different things on most plays, leading him to run when he should throw and throw when he should run.
His mindset isn’t much better following an ugly public end to his Arizona State career. When he entered the transfer portal in February 2022, a viral video surfaced of his ex-teammates clearing out his locker and dumping on him. Daniels took the high road and responded to the video with kind words of appreciation. But deep down, he lands in Baton Rouge with a wounded soul and time running out on his college career.
In his early days at LSU, he makes the conscious decision to kill his new teammates with kindness, absorbing the barbs with a big smile on his face. From the outside, he looks as if he has the perfect amount of thick skin and humility to battle for the starting job. On the inside, he admits later, he feels the sting of being the new kid getting picked on.
Players leave the facility that day liking Jayden Daniels, the person. But Nabers and other players wonder, how will this nerd hold up under pressure?
LSU BEATS OUT Missouri for Daniels’ services. Daniels likes what new coach Brian Kelly and his staff are selling, which is that Baton Rouge is the best place for him to reboot his career. It helps that Joe Burrow, an Ohio State castaway, had just played in the Super Bowl after LSU resuscitated his career two years earlier.
LSU coaches are up-front with Daniels; he’ll have to win the job in an extremely competitive quarterback room. The team already has Garrett Nussmeier, who showed incredible upside as a freshman but only had four games of mop-up duty under his belt. Senior Myles Brennan has experience, but injury and production problems make him a high-basement, low-ceiling option. A good, healthy QB competition would be a positive thing, coaches think.
Daniels says he likes that he’ll have to win his spot. But the pressure on a transfer with an expiring play clock on his career can be daunting, something that Burrow says he felt a few years earlier when he was considering his move to LSU. Second chances are everywhere in college football these days. But if Daniels flamed out in Baton Rouge, he might not have found a good third chance elsewhere.
LSU is desperate, too. Kelly uses the word “infusion” to describe what he thinks the locker room needs. And normally measured offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock has a final videoconference call with Daniels when he’s in the portal, where he catches himself blurting out, “If you come to LSU, we can win the Heisman together.”
The coaching staff knows that there is a version of Daniels that can be a superstar, and LSU could use all the help it can get. Kelly and his staff are facing a flood of transfers and decommitments, and all the normal roster turnover after a coaching change. By the time spring practice began, Kelly says the program was down to 39 scholarship players in a sport where the top programs have 85 scholarship guys.
At LSU, Daniels fits right in. But his new teammates goof on Daniels with great delight all spring. He tells his closest confidante on the coaching staff, Wilson, the truth, which is that he’s gritting his teeth some days to avoid being antagonistic as he catches strays. But his teammates don’t see any of that. Then and now, Daniels projects an approachability and curiosity that sometimes appears as if nothing bothers him. In this case, the California cool is helping.
But his competitive side comes roaring out sometimes. One day that spring, a bunch of offensive players went to Top Golf. Daniels mentions that he’s never been a golfer, and his first swing confirms it. Everybody laughs in disbelief when he unveils a clunky mess of a windup.
“You see him play football, and he is so athletic and fast, and his arm is so crazy, then you see him swing a golf club and go, ‘Man, what’s going on?'” says Josh Williams, the former LSU running back. “You don’t expect a golf swing like that.”
But Daniels isn’t even close to the clear starter as spring ball winds down. And as well as he feels as if he fits in, he’s still not sure if he has friends or frenemies because of the way his teammates pick at him. He mostly bites his tongue at first. But he admits to Wilson that his thick skin act is just that, an act — he feels every barb as if it’s a paper cut.
“No way he’s better than me,” Daniels would say, and that would be the propane in his tank for the day. Eighteen months later, Daniels won the Heisman and should have thanked Riley Leonard. But instead, he shouts out Wilson at the very end of his speech, after his mom and dad, for the way that Wilson pushed him at LSU. “You might be annoying,” Daniels says. “But I love you, dog.”
They find important common ground in an unexpected source: Kobe Bryant. Mamba Mentality had always been Daniels’ adopted philosophy, which is essential in understanding why he so fiercely defends Kobe’s honor. That first spring at LSU, in 2022, somebody made the mistake of saying that Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time. Then and now, this turns out to be a cheat code to instantly get under Daniels’ skin.
“See, Kobe wanted to be the best to ever play basketball,” Wilson says. “But he knew to get there, he had to be the best Kobe Bryant above all else. He raised his level, which made everybody around him try to rise up, too.” It was a lightbulb moment for Daniels. Now, Wilson’s Dr. Phil mumbo jumbo makes more sense to him.
On the field, Daniels has the best skill set of the LSU quarterbacks — everything the world saw in last season’s NFL playoff run is on full display that spring. He makes an instant connection with Nabers and Brian Thomas Jr., with stretches of practice where those three look like the most dangerous passing group in college football. On plays when the pocket breaks down and he has to run, Daniels busts loose, and the LSU defense can’t tackle him.
The three quarterbacks battle through March and April, and when the spring game ends on April 22, Kelly sounds more unsure than ever who his best quarterback will be. He even throws in touted QB recruit Walker Howard in the mix with the others. “I don’t know if we cleared up anything,” Kelly says.
By then, he and Nabers are very close. They text each other constantly, and then each of them starts a group chat with another player, and then another player. Nabers considers himself a troll, and he spots a fellow troll in Daniels. As he has gotten more comfortable inside the LSU locker room, Daniels has begun to joke back with his teammates in a way that they respect.
Daniels: “Get another shower later.” Nabers: “Nah, maybe tomorrow.” Daniels: “OK, I guess I’ll just throw with…” and then he would toss out the name of another receiver. Nabers: “Be there in 10 minutes.”
By the time summer practice kicks off, Daniels has friends all over the locker room. Now, he just has to go win the job as the calendar turns to August.
DANIELS HAD BEEN in Baton Rouge for a few months when he decided to swallow his pride and ask the most pressing question on his mind: What kind of hellish inferno had he transferred into?
He had grown up in Southern California, where summer temperatures could get into the high 90s, but the strong Santa Ana winds kept the air dry and manageable. The average rainfall in the summer is just .1 inches per month. When he went off to ASU, he found Tempe to be 10 degrees hotter but just as dry.
So, he is absolutely unprepared for a Louisiana summer that feels something like a hot tub inside a sauna, with frequent outbursts from the heavens that can seem like the end times. One day in July 2022, he asks Wilson, “Does it always sound like this?”