It might not have been a straight path from Tempe to Baton Rouge, but Sam Leavitt always made sense for Lane Kiffin.
That’s not to dismiss the Demond Williams drama. That well-documented situation somehow unfolded as Leavitt sat court-side with Kiffin at the LSU basketball game, which led many to assume that the Arizona State transfer would wind up somewhere like Miami or Tennessee, where he also visited (he previously visited Kentucky but UK wasn’t among the finalists). In this era, that could never be ruled out. Shoot, we’re in the early stages of “portal flipping,” which seems like another dizzying process for top transfers.
This development came hours after the Leavitt commitment to LSU was announced:
Tennessee hasn’t given up yet re: Sam Leavitt and has still been pushing in hopes of remaining a consideration for him, sources tell @CBSSports pic.twitter.com/pkrv4Ya6Ny
— Matt Zenitz (@mzenitz) January 12, 2026It ain’t over until it’s over. But assuming he does indeed end up signing at LSU after that verbal commitment, Leavitt is an ideal Year 1 quarterback for Kiffin and Charlie Weis Jr. It doesn’t take a quarterback guru to see why that’s the case.
Look no further than Kiffin’s Ole Miss quarterbacks and you’ll see why that’s the case. If there’s a quarterback in college football who feels like he could be the younger brother to Matt Corral and Jaxson Dart, it’s Leavitt. Trinidad Chambliss might’ve finished with the better season than any of them, but he was also someone who clearly understood his skill set upon arrival as a 23-year-old from the Division II ranks (there’s another key statistical difference that I’ll get to later). This is more of a conversation about who Leavitt is right now in comparison to when Corral and Dart began in the Kiffin offense as talented, but mistake-prone quarterbacks (Corral had 16 turnover-worthy plays in Year 1 with Kiffin in 2020 and Dart had 15 turnover-worthy plays as a first-year starter in 2022).
Two things can be true at the same time with Leavitt.
One is that someone with 5,468 yards of offense and 46 career touchdowns at the Power Conference level isn’t exactly someone who is starting at the ground floor. The 21-year-old is ahead of 2020 Corral and 2022 Dart in that regard. It’s exactly why Kiffin pursued Leavitt to be his Year 1 quarterback. There’s a sense of urgency for someone who left an Ole Miss team that was 19 seconds away from playing in a national championship. A year ago, Leavitt’s Arizona State squad was a 4th-and-13 stop away from advancing to the semifinals. Even though 2025 turned into a disappointing season for Leavitt and the Sun Devils, he still out-dueled eventual-Big 12 champ Texas Tech and posted an average of 276 yards of offense in his 7 starts this year.
Leavitt isn’t a lost cause. If that were the case, his portal market would’ve looked much different than it did.
He is, however, someone who needs some developing to his game. In those 7 games in 2025, he had 12 turnover-worthy plays. That was up from 5 in 2024 when he blossomed into an ideal 1-2 punch with Cam Skattebo. Leavitt played in roughly half the games, yet he still took more sacks in 2025 (20) than he had in 2024 (19) with a pressure-to-sack percentage that rose from 13.3% to 23.0%. Whether that was health-related or not, it was troubling to see Leavitt’s efficiency go in the wrong direction. After he averaged 8.1 yards/attempt in 2024, he didn’t hit that mark once in 2025.
Leavitt was still effective as a runner in Year 2 at ASU — he averaged 7.1 yards/rush and was only 2 yards short from matching his 2024 yards after first contact with 41 fewer attempts — but he averaged just 2 designed runs per game. It was difficult to build an ideal game plan for Leavitt, and it showed.
Enter Kiffin, stage left.
In Kiffin’s offense, Leavitt will throw out of play-action much more than he did at ASU. At least that’s what Kiffin’s time at Ole Miss would suggest is imminent. Here are the percentages of drop-backs with play-action for each QB1 during Kiffin’s 6 years in Oxford:
2020 (Corral): 49.1% 2021 (Corral): 60.4% 2022 (Dart): 57.6% 2023 (Dart): 45.5% 2024 (Dart): 53.2% 2025 (Chambliss): 48.8%At Arizona State, Leavitt went from 38.5% play-action in 2024 to 29.6% in 2025. I’ll bet all of Leavitt’s NIL money that we see that number go up a considerable amount with Kiffin. Leavitt should be well-suited to handle that. Of those 12 turnover-worthy plays that Leavitt had in 2025, only 1 came went he operated out of play-action. He also only took 3 of those 20 sacks on those 85 play-action drop-backs. It might’ve been difficult to draw up a game plan for Leavitt at times because of how much success he’s had in his career when he can extend plays, but one can see why Kiffin and the LSU staff targeted him after a somewhat disappointing season.
I’d bet slightly less money but still have plenty of confidence that, much like the last quarterback who left Arizona State for LSU — some guy named “Jayden Daniels” — Leavitt will have more depth at the pass-catcher spots. Don’t get it twisted. Skattebo was a 1-man wrecking crew in 2024, and when healthy in 2024-25, projected first-round pick Jordyn Tyson was a better player than any incoming pass catcher at LSU. But the depth that Kiffin added in those spots had to be a selling point. ‘Tre Brown, Tre Wilson, Jackson Harris and Jayce Brown will all come in as decorated transfers to a group that’ll return dynamic pass-catching tight end Trey’Dez Green and the promising, but oft-injured, Nic Anderson.
In an ideal world, Leavitt is someone who can continue to find effective ways to have a diverse target distribution while still presenting the mobile element.
Chambliss ended up being a bit of an outlier for Kiffin quarterbacks because he had 81 designed runs compared to just 24 scrambles. When he was pressured a career-high 17 times by Miami in the Fiesta Bowl, he only scrambled once. Chambliss was still an effective designed runner and because he saw the field so well while extending plays, a scramble often felt like a last resort. Corral and Dart were much more likely to turn to that to move the chains, which was why they never even had a 2-1 split of designed runs-to-scrambles in a season (Chambliss was 3.4-to-1 in 2025).
Leavitt, on the other hand, has had a 1-2 split of designed runs-to-scrambles (43-to-79 at ASU). We know that scrambles are still going to be a part of Leavitt’s game. In his last full season in 2024, Leavitt led Power Conference quarterbacks in both scramble attempts (51) and scramble yards (429). That’s reminiscent of when Corral had 55 scrambles in 2021. As great as Corral was when healthy that season, he also got hurt in 2 of Ole Miss’s 3 losses. If you can believe it, Dart actually dialed back that part of his game in his first 2 years with Kiffin, but when Ole Miss was desperate for a run game in the Playoff-hopeful 2024 season, Dart was No. 6 among Power Conference quarterbacks with 45 scrambles.
It’s probably a bad sign for LSU’s offense if Leavitt has 45 scrambles. Not with the pieces that should be in place with the LSU ground game — retaining Caden Durham and Harlem Berry was huge — and his aforementioned pass catchers. Bigger throwing windows will come. Leavitt might make some Chambliss-like plays while escaping pressure, but if Kiffin and Weis work their magic, those instances won’t be as frequent as it felt during his time at ASU.
The skill set is there. Leavitt will enter 2026 as one of the SEC‘s most decorated quarterbacks, and understandably so. All 3 Ole Miss starting quarterbacks earned All-SEC honors in their pre-draft seasons. Leavitt could set up to be next, albeit with a different SEC program.
The path is clear.
Why Sam Leavitt to LSU always made sense for Lane Kiffin in Year 1 Saturday Down South.
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