2021 NFL Draft: Terrace Marshall Jr., the other LSU wide receiver

Marshall at LSU, 2019-2020

Any scout looking into Marshall for the 2021 NFL Draft will have to look at his LSU tenure as having two eras: The 2019 championship season where he played predominately on the outside and the 2020 season where he chiefly lined up as a slot receiver. It will be impossible to understand the kind of athlete Marshall is and has the potential to be without treating these two seasons as different eras, where he showcased two different skillsets.

Marshall got the 2019 season off with a bang, bringing in three touchdowns against Georgia Southern in the inaugural regular-season game. He would be the number three receiver behind Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson; a trio that would be responsible for 51 receiving touchdowns of Burrows record-breaking 60-touchdown season. Marshall was responsible for 13 of those scores, averaging 14.6 yards per reception.

According to his LSU profile, 13 single-season touchdowns would have been an LSU-record, had Chase (20 touchdowns) and Jefferson (18 touchdowns) not already beaten and exceeded that number during the same fateful season. It really is hard to qualify just how good that 2019 roster was: Most teams would be thrilled to have just one receiver with over 13 touchdowns in a season. The 2019 LSU Tigers had three receivers who did just that.

Despite being the number three receiver in a historic trio, Marshall still found ways to shine on the outside. With 46 receptions, Marshall was a critical part of the passing attack that season, ranking seventh in the NCAA for receiving touchdowns, per Sports-Reference. Despite only getting around half the receptions as Chase and Jefferson in 2019, Marshall’s height and speed kept defensive backs guessing, drawing away safeties and other defenders in the secondary to free up space for receivers like Jefferson and Chase to thrive.

The 2020 season was always going to be a tough act to follow, for both Marshall and LSU. The team lost several key players from their historic run to the 2020 NFL Draft: An NCAA tying-record 14 players from the 2019 campaign to be exact. A further 18 would leave for other reasons, either opting-out (due to COVID-19), transferring or getting suspended.

Without their Heisman-winning quarterback and many of their big playmakers from the previous season, LSU took a step back in the abridged 10-game season. The biggest offensive playmaker to be lost for 2020 was undoubtedly wide receiver Chase, aka the highest projected wide receiver in the 2021 NFL Draft.

But as Sun Tzu once said, “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity”. As Sun Tzu was almost assuredly thinking about intra-collegiate athletics when he said it 2,500 years ago, this quote applies equally to Marshall’s situation in 2020.

Choosing to play despite the circumstances, Marshall had an opportunity to be the top wide receiver on the roster and make a name for himself heading into the 2021 NFL Draft. And though Marshall chose to opt-out for the last three games of the season, he still put up plenty of quality footage for NFL scouts to pour over and evaluate in 2020.

Next up, we’ll discuss the things Marshall does well as a wide receiver and the things he’ll need to work on once he gets drafted this April.