Baker says injury ‘best thing’ to happen to Perkins
03/26/2025
(photo credit: Nate Bell)
By Hunt Palmer
BATON ROUGE, La. — Harold Perkins isn’t practicing with the Tigers, but he’s working.
The senior linebacker suffered an ACL tear in September making a tackle against UCLA. Earlier this year, Perkins decided to play his final remaining season at LSU as opposed to entering the NFL Draft coming off of a significant injury.
LSU defensive coordinator Blake Baker joined Jacob Hester on Off the Bench Wednesday morning and detailed Perkins’s commitment to returning a better player.
“Perk is extremely locked in,” Baker said. “I said this when it happened, and I didn’t mean it in a negative light, but in some ways being hurt might have been the best thing that ever happened to him. Kind of just sit back, let the game unfold from a mental standpoint in front of him.”
The mental aspect of the game is one that Perkins can continue to work on while recovering from the knee injury. While his peers are out in the spring air, Perkins is behind closed doors doing what he can thanks to cutting edge technology that LSU has been using for a handful of years.
The work that he’s putting in with Jack Marucci downstairs with the (virtual reality) obviously not being able to get the physical reps on the field, he could easily just take it easy and just come to the hour film meeting that we do every single day and that be it, but he’s going above and beyond and answering questions,” Baker said. “He’s extremely locked in. He’s going to have a big year next year.”
Since a breakout freshman campaign that produced 7.5 sacks and 13 tackles for loss, Perkins has garnered all-American hype but has struggled to take the next step.
“Part of the problem, in my opinion, has been the expectation that’s been put on him,” Baker said. “Obviously with a player of that talent and that caliber, we’ve still got to remember that he’s 20 years old or whatever he is.”
Whit Weeks emerged as a leader on the LSU defense in 2024. Though he suffered a broken leg in the Texas Bowl, Weeks is expected back at full strength for summer workouts in July. That returning production eases the expectation on Perkins who is still working toward finding the perfect role in Baker’s defense.
Baker insists this will be Perkins’s most talent company in the linebacker rotation.
“Between (Perkins) and West (Weeks) and Davohn (Keys)and Whit, some of these other guys, Ty Singleton is coming along and then we get three more freshmen, I think they’re all going to complement each other really well,” Baker said. “So, I don’t think the onus is going to be on ‘oh, here’s Harold Perkins, he’s the star on the defense.’ I think we have a lot of really, really good players in that room that feed off of each other and make each other better.”