He was once committed to South Carolina. He’ll start for LSU in the title game
Lloyd Cushenberry III has no ill feelings toward South Carolina.
The starting center at LSU, who will face Clemson on Monday with a national title on the line, went with a coach to a camp in Columbia the summer before his junior year. He left with an offer, committed soon after to Steve Spurrier’s Gamecocks and was set to go to college 11 hours from home. For Cushenberry, home is just outside of Baton Rouge.
And then everything happened to the 2015 Gamecocks.
Spurrier left six games in. Will Muschamp took over that December. And the distance started to play into his mind.
“I kind of rushed into a decision,” Cushenberry said. “I committed there. It was exciting. So then, Steve Spurrier (quit) halfway through that season and coach Muschamp came in and I kind of reconsidered. I mean, it’s 11 hours from home so it’s kind of far away. That’s when Mississippi State came in the picture.”
He was still publicly committed to the Gamecocks up until signing day in February 2016. Behind the scenes he was silently committed to Dan Mullen and the Bulldogs, aiming to cut that drive in half between college and home.
In the last hours, the home-state LSU Tigers came in.
“It was nothing against the (South Carolina) program or the coaches,” Cushenberry said. “It was just I wanted to be close to home and same thing with Mississippi State. I was gonna go there, but you know, couldn’t pass on the great opportunity coming here.”
He joked that he was the last offer of LSU’s 2016 class. He was considered the No. 1,522 recruit in the country in the 247Sports Composite rankings.
As of Saturday, his picture on his 247Sports recruiting page is him in South Carolina gear. His Rivals page has no photo next to the two-star rating.
Now he’s an All-American who’s starting in the College Football Playoff championship game.
His position coach, James Cregg, went through the work Cushenberry put in to get where he is before finally settling on a phrase someone suggested: a self-made lineman.
“You to see it with him,” Cregg said of his recruiting profile. “He’s got good feet. He wanted to be good. He’s the type of guy who is going to approach you and say, ‘Hey coach, what can I do to get better?’ And it is sincere, and he’s going to work at it, and he’s going to go out on his own and do the extra, and it’s pretty cool to see.”
By the time Cregg got his hands on Cushenberry, he’d been on campus one year as a redshirt.
He played six games on the offensive line in 2017, then started in 2018 and 2019.
And Cushenberry adds one other dimension.
“He’s basically the coach when I’m not there,” Cregg said. “So he sort of coaches the room when I’m not around.”
LSU’s line paved the way for one of the top offenses in the country, winning the Joe Moore award for top line in the land.
And Cushenberry, once a Gamecocks pledge, is in the middle of it, literally, pulling his fellow linemen along and trying to guide them to the kind of growth he had.
“Fifteen, 20 minutes away from my home, really couldn’t pass up an opportunity,” Cushenberry said. “I just felt like it didn’t matter where I was ranked. When I stepped on campus, I felt like I could put a lot of work in and prove myself.”
This story was originally published January 11, 2020 at 4:28 PM with the headline "He was once committed to South Carolina. He’ll start for LSU in the title game."
