How Jay Johnson plans to revamp LSU's roster in new landscape

The past week for Jay Johnson has been a whirlwind. After losing in Chapel Hill to North Carolina in ten innings, Johnson has attacked the transfer portal, evaluated his roster, and taken some time to think about the ever changing landscape of college baseball and how he needs to grow with it.

The next step is already in motion for Johnson, and it happens quickly. Nine players have already entered the transfer portal, several more have decisions to make about their future, whether it’s the MLB Draft or at LSU. For Johnson, it encapsulates where college athletics is in the modern era, but he’s embraced the challenge.

“My heart is full when I talk about the 2024 team and the season,” Johnson said. “We had exit meetings on Wednesday that were very positive. When looking at the players that have committed to returning in 2025 you have some good pieces and great character. I’m comfortable with them as a foundation. Then, we have to go get some players. We had 13 players drafted last year and we’ll have between 5 and 11 players drafted this year and that’s a lot of turnover the last two years. That’s what we’re also here to do –  develop guys for professional baseball. That’s led to a hustle of what we need to do to put our 2025 roster where it needs to be. It will look different by design and I’m very excited about that. We’ve had some good interactions from on campus visits and being on the road the past couple of days and we’ll continue that up to the first day of school.” 

After exit meetings, Johnson clearly has a good handle on which players he trusts to be returning and it starts with the group of freshmen who just finished contributing to the Tigers postseason push. They will serve as the foundation for the Tigers’ 2025 roster, but Johnson also talked about adding more high-level talent to get the ceiling for this program back where it needs to be.

“This is a new world for me,” Johnson said. “ I’ve had a couple of calls where something was said then another thing happened. When you look at a freshman pitcher like Kade Anderson, with the talent and competitiveness, the poise, and improvement, that’s something to get excited about. When you have Jake Brown, Steven Milam, Ashton Larson, I spoke a lot about those four guys throughout the year and that’s a great starting point for a sophomore class. Easily the best freshman class we’ve had in the three years I’ve been here in terms of what they contributed on the field. To lose a talent like Chase Shores and still have success, that’s a credit to our team. He’s rolling pretty good in rehab. He was throwing up to 97 miles per hour and we’re up to 13 months off the surgery.

“Obviously, there are some situations where guys are in between pro baseball and coming back. All of those guys will be welcomed back and have a place on our roster. Even with that, we have a lot of work to do to have the team we want to have. It will have a lot of high impact. I’m not so worried about the numbers. That’s where my head is at in terms of building the roster moving forward and at a place like LSU you can do that. It’s really fluid right now.”

The shift in focus from building depth and development to building a “Win-Now” roster is one that jumped on Johnson abruptly. This past season included several underclassmen looking to contribute and develop, but in a conference where the top teams hardly even consider playing freshmen and instead are jumping at the chance to get older, it represents a shift in mindset that has forced the Tigers’ head coach to adapt even quicker than expected.

Johnson always looks to be ahead of the curve, and now with an offseason to regroup, he’s intent on not only catching up, but getting back ahead of the field entering year four at LSU.

“We’re always evolving and learning,” Johnson said. “This team we just had was a very deep roster, but you can only have nine players in a lineup at one time. For the SEC, I played and pitched a lot of guys and did that with development in mind. The reality now is we’re in a different landscape. It’s not about building a program anymore and that’s my wheelhouse. My specialty is developing a program, but now it’s about building your team one year at a time. I don’t say that any other way than, I want the guy who Skip Bertman was able to redshirt, then play a role, then elevate in that role, then become the player everyone around here remembers, but the reality of that is that’s much more difficult to do in this landscape today, so we have to adjust. We have to overcome that.”