Garrett Nussmeier's final season at LSU is a family affair

BATON ROUGE, La. -- Doug Nussmeier rarely gets days like this one anymore, hanging around a college football field, watching his sons Garrett and Colton soft toss the ball to each other. Garrett has been at LSU, trying to lead the Tigers on a title run. Colton has been in Texas, where he has developed into an ESPN Junior 300 prospect as one of the top quarterbacks in the country, with offers from LSU, Alabama, Florida, Georgia and many others.

Doug has been in the NFL as an assistant coach, living apart from his family the past two years so Colton could finish out his high school career.

But on this day in June, they are all together at the LSU elite summer camp. Doug Nussmeier smiles big. He decided to leave the Philadelphia Eagles and take the offensive coordinator job with the Saints earlier this year. Now, all he needs to do to visit his older son is hop in his car and drive for an hour or so.

The family calls this a "full circle moment."

Doug started his NFL career as a quarterback with the Saints in New Orleans. He met his wife, Christi, in New Orleans. He won a Super Bowl in the Superdome. Christi, a Louisiana native, instilled a love for her home state in her kids, a love that not only led Garrett to LSU but kept him there for five years. Now here they are, Doug, Garrett and Colton, all back in Louisiana on a swampy hot summer day.

Doug stands off to the side, watching, not coaching. Though he played quarterback, he never put pressure on his sons to play the position. But they wanted to be just like him. His No. 13 jersey and all.

"He was my idol growing up," Garrett says. "He's the most influential person in my career."

Through backyard drills and days spent breaking down tape, through 12 moves to follow Doug on his coaching journey, Garrett soaked up knowledge, learned how to deal with change as a constant, spent time on different campuses, in different stadiums -- every moment leading to the one he faces now in his fifth and final season with the Tigers. His mother inspired his love for LSU and his dad inspired his obsession with the quarterback position.

They both led him here, to the biggest year of his life.

CHRISTI NUSSMEIER WOULD have been perfectly happy if her sons hadn't become quarterbacks. But looking back, it does seem like they were always on the path to running an offense. When Christi says her sons were born with a football in their hands, she means it almost literally. After Garrett was born in 2002, she chose a Sports Illustrated-themed birth announcement. In the photo, Garrett snuggles a football.

Garrett's earliest football memories start at age 6, when he asked his dad to throw with him in their backyard in Seattle. The warmup Doug showed him is the one Garrett still uses before every practice and game, focusing on flexibility first before moving into segments that isolate different parts of the throwing motion.

At every college stop they made, Garrett observed the quarterbacks: Drew Stanton at Michigan State, Jake Locker at Washington, A.J. McCarron at Alabama. Garrett saw the way each player led his team not only in games but at practices. He watched the way they interacted with their teammates. He sometimes sat in the room with them to break down tape.

"I was subconsciously just learning things without actually knowing what I was learning," Garrett says. "As I got older, I started to realize, 'Hey, OK, that's what they were doing.'"

From there, Garrett steadily improved and kept his eyes focused on getting a college scholarship, then eventually playing in the NFL. Garrett was smaller for a quarterback at 6-foot-1, and his parents had no idea where he might end up. But they encouraged him to keep pushing forward, and Doug provided feedback whenever Garrett asked.

"I was hoping that as he started to grow into his middle school years, maybe he'll be good enough to be a starter on his high school team. And then if he's that, well, then maybe that opens the door for him to have the opportunity to play at a small school or someplace," Doug says.

Doug had taken an assistant coaching job with the Cowboys in 2018, so the Nussmeiers moved to the Dallas area, where Garrett would play high school football. Christi remembers one moment early in Garrett's high school career that changed everything.

"Garrett made some moves, and I just remember my face going, 'Oh my gosh,' and I looked at Doug. We both looked at each other," Christi says. "We knew Garrett was talented, and we knew he was special, but I asked Doug, 'That's not normal, is it?' And Doug said, 'No.'"

Adds Doug: "He wasn't the biggest guy, but all of a sudden, some schools started coming to see him."

Ole Miss was the first to invite him to a football camp, then LSU invited him to campus, too. LSU held a special place in his heart. Garrett was born in Lake Charles, Louisiana, where Christi grew up.

Christi was determined to give her three children -- including daughter, Ashlynn, also an LSU student -- a place they could call home, considering all the moving they did. They may have changed addresses every few years, but they would always return to Lake Charles for the holidays and summers. Christi cooked specialties from home and played zydeco music. When people asked the kids where they were from, they would answer, "Louisiana."

"Lake Charles was the only place that was constant my life," Garrett says. "When you only live somewhere at the longest three years, you're just spinning around, and so Louisiana was just always my home. When I came on my first visit here, I just knew this is where I want to be."

Garrett loved then-coach Ed Orgeron, but he really wanted to play for then-offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger. He committed in 2020 as a junior. Ensminger announced his retirement later that year, but Garrett signed in 2021 anyway, as an ESPN 300 prospect and one of the top quarterbacks in the nation.

Garrett played in four games and ultimately redshirted, but midway through that freshman season, LSU announced Orgeron would not return for 2022. For months, Garrett felt uncertainty about his future and the future of the program.

Enter Brian Kelly.

ON JAN. 7, 2013, Garrett Nussmeier and Brian Kelly shared a football field for the first time. Doug was the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Alabama when the Crimson Tide played Kelly and Notre Dame in the BCS national championship game in South Florida.

Garrett, who was 10 at the time, remembers falling asleep at halftime with Alabama up 28-0. But he also remembers heading down to the field after the 42-14 victory, throwing confetti and holding the championship trophy. During a quarterback meeting their first year together, Garrett decided to have some fun. He turned to Kelly and asked, "Remember that national championship?" They had a good laugh.

But the transition to playing under Kelly wasn't so easy.

Nussmeier thought that after his first year at LSU, he was going to be the guy at quarterback. But Kelly went into the transfer portal and brought in Jayden Daniels, who ultimately won the starting job in 2022.

"Things were a little rocky at first," Garrett Nussmeier admits. "But as time has gone on, my relationship with Coach Kelly has just grown."

Nussmeier had opportunities to leave through the transfer portal, especially after serving as the backup to Daniels in 2022 and 2023. But he knew what it was like to leave a place, having done it so much growing up. He knew how hard it was to start over, make new friends, go through proving himself all over again.

He watched his dad preach patience throughout his own coaching career. Maybe more than anything, Garrett felt an unwavering loyalty to the state of Louisiana and desperately wanted to bring a championship to the place he calls home.

"I just didn't feel like my time here was done," Nussmeier says.

"He came in built for an old-school mentality of 'I'm going to stick it out. I'm going to work my tail off and get that opportunity,'" Kelly says. "He saw some things that we were doing in developing Jayden and getting him to be a better version of himself. He grew up loving LSU. If you add all of those things up, it wasn't about just throwing some money at him. It had to be more than that. He is a guy that loves transformational relationships instead of transactional."

Garrett finally got his opportunity to start last season, opening with a 300-yard passing day in a last-second loss to USC. LSU rolled to a 6-1 start, but the next three games proved to be the most humbling stretch of his career. The Tigers dropped all three -- to Texas A&M, Alabama and Florida -- as Nussmeier struggled to play consistently and avoid mistakes. In those three losses, he threw for five combined touchdowns and five interceptions, lost two fumbles and took 11 sacks, including a whopping seven against the Gators.

"There was a part of me that was doing too much and trying to be perfect instead of just playing football," Nussmeier says. "There was a lot of overthinking, a lot of trying to make things happen when I didn't need to. That was one of the biggest learning moments for me in my career."

Indeed, both Kelly and offensive coordinator Joe Sloan say Nussmeier had to go through those moments to learn and grow. Kelly called the losses a "low point" in decision-making and managing the game.

"A lot of playing quarterback is developing some calluses, and he was able to develop some calluses, and he knows what the fire feels like," Sloan says.

At 6-4, with a once promising season on the verge of disaster, LSU hosted Vanderbilt at home in late November. "That was a big moment for me," Nussmeier says.

Before the game, he took a deep breath and told himself to forget about being perfect. LSU won its final three games, including a 44-31 victory over Baylor in the Kinder's Texas Bowl. Nussmeier threw for 313 yards with three touchdowns and an interception, a game Kelly described as his best of the season.

"He didn't take the big play as being the only play," Kelly says. "He started to figure out that zero was OK. Once he felt that zero is OK, and I don't have to make a play each and every down, the offense played very well."

Doug would watch nearly every game alone in a hotel room as he prepared his own game plans for the Eagles. Sometimes he would watch on TV, sometimes on an iPad. He made sure never to overstep or question the coaching Nussmeier was getting from Kelly and Sloan.

"They have a plan, and they are working diligently to improve the things that need to be improved and strengthen the things that need to be strengthened," Doug says.

LSU ended the season 9-4. Nussmeier had already announced he would be back for a fifth and final season. He asked his dad to handle his NIL negotiations.

WHEN BAUER SHARP came to LSU on his official visit, he went to dinner with Nussmeier and linebacker Whit Weeks. Nussmeier, Sharp says, was instrumental in helping him decide to transfer from Oklahoma to LSU.

Indeed, Nussmeier took an active role in helping LSU revamp its roster through the portal, understanding that both he and the program had championship aspirations for 2025. In addition to Sharp, LSU signed two top five wide receivers (Barion Brown and Nic Anderson) and revamped a defense that has struggled at times.

The presence of a veteran quarterback, going into his second year as a starter, proved to be a huge selling point, too.

"With him being in the offense for four years, that played a huge part in it, and just to see what type of leadership he had, and to connect with him, that was so inviting," Sharp says. "It was so encouraging. I loved what I saw."

Nussmeier is the rare quarterback who has stayed put. Of the Top 20 quarterbacks who signed in 2021, 14 ended up transferring. Seven are playing their fifth seasons in 2025. Of those seven, only Nussmeier and Behren Morton at Texas Tech are still playing for the teams with which they originally signed. To Garrett, the decision to play one more year was not complicated.

"When you look at the statistics of quarterbacks getting drafted high, a lot of them were fifth years," Garrett says. "That experience matters for my position. So I think there's a lot of value in staying."

Kelly points to stats, too, and the way his quarterbacks play better in their final season as his starter. Daniels is the perfect example. In Year 1 under Kelly, Daniels threw for 2,913 yards and 17 touchdowns. In Year 2, Daniels threw for 3,812 yards and 40 touchdowns, en route to winning the Heisman Trophy.

"I really believe experience at that position is the most important thing," Kelly says. "Wherever I've been, your last year is your best year, so the expectations are that the same will occur for Garrett."

Indeed, early Heisman odds have Nussmeier second, right behind Texas quarterback Arch Manning. Nussmeier also is ranked as one of the top quarterback prospects for the NFL draft next season. (ESPN's Matt Miller has him going No. 11 .)

"I definitely think he's capable of winning a Heisman, but that trophy is based off a season," Sloan says. "He has the talent, and we have the people around him. I just know this. He's who we would want to be a quarterback at LSU. If we got to draft, we'd pick Garrett Nussmeier."

Nussmeier worked this offseason to put himself in position to win a title, dropping a few pounds, adding muscle mass and working with private speed coaches in Dallas. Sloan says Nussmeier is in the best shape of his life, and that will allow him to help more in the run game. Managing the pocket, speeding up the process at the line of scrimmage and his footwork also have been a huge point of emphasis this offseason.

"When his feet are on time, and staying what I call tight and he's not having big movements, he's extremely accurate, and especially more and more accurate down the field," Sloan says.

He also took more ownership of the team.

"He's a whole different person, the way he carries himself, the way he speaks to others," running back Caden Durham said. "We see his energy in the morning, 7 o'clock for workouts. Everybody is like, 'We're going to go as hard as you and even harder,' just because he's the leader. He's the head honcho. This offense runs through him. So let's go."

Nothing about what is ahead will come as a shock. Walking into SEC stadiums with his dad prepared him for big crowds, big moments. Memories often trickle back. The first time taking the field at Baton Rouge in 2020, closing his eyes, remembering what it felt like to be inside a roaring, sold-out Death Valley. When he walked onto the field at Auburn in 2022, he turned to Sloan and Daniels, pointed to the sideline near the away team tunnel and said, "That's where I was crying when the Kick Six happened," remembering back to the 2013 Iron Bowl when his dad was an Alabama assistant.

The Nussmeiers call all of these moments "God winks," each one intertwined, interconnected, preparing Garrett for the moment he has waited on since he first threw a football in the backyard with his dad.

Now with Doug just a drive away in Louisiana, the place Garrett loves more than anything, they are closer than they have been since they lived under one roof in Dallas. Christi will be able to make her way to LSU and Saints home games. Ashlynn will be there. Colton may make a trip or two depending on his schedule.

There is, of course, one way for this full circle moment to be complete: hoisting a championship trophy.

"I've always wanted this pressure. I've always wanted this expectation. I've always wanted people to talk about me the way that they are and have this expectation," Nussmeier said. "It's definitely a dream come true.

"But it's not finished yet."