By GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
What has been known for more than a year about the 2025 LSU football team was proven again on Monday.
The Tigers, even though they finished a disappointing 7-6 after rising to No. 3 early in the season at 4-0, were a talented team in spots.
During LSU’s Pro Day in the indoor facility in front of a host of NFL personnel executives and scouts, cornerback Mansoor Delane ran a lightning-like 40-yard dash in 4.35 seconds. Outside linebacker Harold Perkins Jr., who has wowed NFL scouts since his freshman year in 2022 here and there but tended to underperform overall, ran a 4.38 40-yard dash, which was amazing for his 222-pound size.
And quarterback Garrett Nussmeier was zipping the ball accurately all over the field as if it was 2024 all over again before his abdomen injury on the second day of practice last August. That caused him to play most of the season in pain and subsequently not throw well – until the Senior Bowl last January.
The Garrett Nussmeier Injury Mystery. Was it a mistaken diagnosis?https://t.co/ZXGywte4ro
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) January 30, 2026
Delane, a transfer from Virginia Tech who just played his senior season at LSU last year, has already been projected to be the first cornerback taken in the seven-round NFL Draft on April 23-25 in Pittsburgh.
Perkins is slated to be in the second or third round at best, but he sure turned some heads on Monday as he also posted a 35-inch vertical leap and a broad jump of 10 feet and four inches.
Nussmeir proved for the second time since he was a star of the Senior Bowl practices and the MVP of the game in Mobile, Alabama, last January that he is much healthier now than he was during the 2025 season when he clearly struggled to put anything on the ball because of the injury.
“Feeling pretty good, getting back to being myself,” he said Monday as he did at the Senior Bowl and again at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis in February. “It’s been obviously a long process of trying to do that, but feeling great. Felt like today I showed that and in a sense showed who I am when I’m healthy. Being able to show that I’m fully healthy, 100 percent and being back to do the things that I do best.”
As he said at the Combine, Nussmeier detailed exactly when the abdomen injury happened on the second day of camp last August.
“Just routine routes and felt a stabbing pain in my abdomen,” Nussmeier said. “It was just a freak deal. As I said before, I’m still not going to get into the specifics of what the injury actually was. But it was just kind of a freak deal and an unfortunate thing.”
In 2024 when healthy, Nussmeier finished fifth in the nation in passing yards with 4,052 and 10th with 29 touchdowns as he completed 337 of 525 with 12 interceptions. In 2025 with core pain on virtually every throw, he completed 194 of 288 passes for 1,927 yards and 12 touchdowns with five interceptions before he aggravated the injury and sat out the last four games of the season.
Nussmeier had to alter his throwing style last season because of the pain and picked up bad habits that he was able to correct less than two weeks before the Senior Bowl. That was after getting what he called the correct diagnosis from doctors outside of LSU after the season.
“It was unfortunate, but it is going to make me a better player,” Nussmeier said.
Nussmeier is projected by most draft experts to be the third quarterback drafted with that likely happening in the second or third round.
Linebacker West Weeks, meanwhile, ran a 4.5-second 40-yard dash, which is impressive for his position.
“I know a lot of teams, they see a white boy and say, “Oh, he can’t run,'” Weeks said.
In all, 17 LSU players participated. Other than Delane, Perkins, Nussmeier and Weeks, the other 13 players were wide receivers Barion Brown, Aaron Anderson, Zavion Thomas and Chris Hilton Jr., tight end Bauer Sharp, offensive lineman Josh Thompson, defensive tackles Jacobian Guillory and Bernard Gooden, edge rushers Jack Pyburn, Patrick Payton and Jimari Butler, safety A.J. Haulcy and kicker Damian Ramos.
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