Well…he’s gone. How will you remember the Brian Kelly error—sorry I meant era—at LSU?
Adam
The carpetbagger has left the porch.
Max
How will I remember Brian Kelly?
Through Harold Perkins, Joe Sloan, and the desire to be right consuming the desire to be good at football. Through Damonic Williams, Derrick Harmon, and the lack of hunger to solve problems, modernize with a changing era, and fill pressing needs. Finally, through Dakorien Moore, Bryce Underwood, and the inability to hunt hard enough with the big
dogs for big prizes. I’ve said enough about why Harold Perkins and the refusal to see what was so obvious, but the unwillingness to change course, the fact that his entire tenure felt like it was about being right above winning football games. The fact of the matter is that Brian Kelly actually got a lot right at LSU. No matter how unlikable he is, he’s a smart guy and there is a good football coach in there.
The problem is that he wasn’t a pragmatist. At the end of the day, being a Head Coach is about solving problems and cutting the edge of everything. It is not about you. The results are king, and there is nothing not worth doing if it doesn’t serve the chase for victory. Winning games at a high level is incredibly difficult, but it is that way only because there are so many legions of dangerous competitors that, if you’re not doing something, ANYTHING, it puts you behind. It’s not difficult because many of the rakes they stepped on were hard to avoid. Some were, but many were not. Stubbornness will blind you, and the top of college football is a treacherous sea to navigate blind. Your margin for error is razor-thin.
With this in mind, if you want to build a top-end program, your process has to be pristine. Doing this job at an elite level requires the humility to surrender to that. You must surrender to the fact that you are far more likely to fail at all times than you are to succeed, and if you take your eye off the ball in any way, you will guarantee it. We have seen far too many coaches with amazing lists of accomplishments lose their edge in an instant for anyone to think they are exempt, that they cannot ever be wrong. You will only avoid being fatally wrong if you desperately search under every rock for something that will help you avoid it. Your *results* will not always be perfect. You will screw up hires, you will bet on the development of players that just don’t pan out, you will lose recruits, so on and so forth. Your margin for error in those areas is not forgiving, but it *does* exist. Your margin of error on process, however is 0.
The reason that I, throughout this entire era, grew so concerned about seemingly trivial things is that they were symptoms of severe disease in the process of this program. Small things, such as not being in on top-end talent that, suddenly by virtue of rule changes, became available to you. It took them 3 years to properly hunt in free agency. Sure, Jayden Daniels was a transfer and CRUSHED it, but he was a bit of a reclamation project. That isn’t what the portal is for, and despite some such results, the *process* was not that of a heavy-hitter overall until this past offseason. What it told me is that LSU, whether it was an NIL issue, a Kelly issue, or as it turned out, both, was not as desperate to stack talent as they needed to be. Additionally, accessing the very top of the HS crop was more difficult for them than some of the teams they’d need to beat to win championships. They were behind. Of course, their collapse wasn’t just a talent thing, not even mostly. It was about judgment. Their decision to start Harold Perkins at the STAR, a position that is quite literally the nickel corner in the modern game, told me that this season was likely doomed before it started. Why did it tell me that? The D is good enough to win a title despite these last couple of weeks, it’s the offense that’s the problem right?? Well, that’s true, but it’s not about that. That choice wasn’t the main illness itself, but it served as a diagnostic tool because it’s simply not a serious thing to do. It’s schematically illiterate. It is not something a program that has the judgment, pragmatism, and grip on reality it needs to win a title would do. It was a symptom. You cannot win titles by accident.
As much as LSU fans like to revise history and pretend that’s what happened with Orgeron and even Miles, it wasn’t. Keeping Sloan after last year did not age well, but was at least almost defensible. It was a little tougher to justify keeping him when Underwood flipped, but there is at least a little bit of hindsight involved in saying he should have just fired him. There needed to be institutional changes on offense, however, akin to what Ed Orgeron did when he brought in Joe Brady, and an outright OC change would certainly not have been uncalled for. Sure, Orgeron clearly checked out of coaching while on the job, but before then, the process, the HUNGER, the understanding of the arms race and what it takes to win, and the endless search, the sheer desire for solutions to problems, they were just excellent. In 2018, many people were content to bet on Myles Brennan, but Ed Orgeron relentlessly pursued options and a possible upgrade that went by the name of Joe Burrow. Kelly would not have gone to the mat to hunt Joe Burrow out of the Midwest. He and LSU’s NIL operation would have let him portal to a school more serious about loading up. The failure of the Kelly era has allowed the nightmare implications of Ed Orgeron’s collapse to finally set in for me. What we hired Kelly to do…we already had if he had just continued to do it. Think Orgeron would lag in the chase of top-end talent? Even as he checked out, he was recruiting his ASS off! You think Orgeron would wait 3 years to sound the alarm on NIL and modernize their approach? No fucking WAY, not before he climbed that mountain at least. Orgeron let go when he reached the summit, and there was no bargaining that would change that, so we had to move on. From that pre-2023 offseason and onward especially however, the process just wasn’t there for Brian Kelly’s LSU. There were dead canaries all over this coal mine if you knew where to look.
Evan
I was anti-Kelly from Day 1. I have negative memories associated with that Monday in November 2021. While I enjoy pissing on his grave and looking forward to a sunnier future, I’m first going to do something unexpected… I’m going to speak highly of something Brian Kelly did.
He got Jayden Daniels, and I love Jayden Daniels. He was an astonishing talent who instantly injected energy into an uncertain era. We’ve seen countless incredible football players in purple and gold, but so few were electrifying in the way he was. He made watching LSU football a true joy (for 50 percent of the time… we’ll get to that) and has me excited to watch Washington D.C.’s NFL franchise, a truly unbelievable accomplishment. He was a special player, and I’m grateful to Brian Kelly for getting him to my alma mater.
Now, as for everything else…
Brian Kelly is not a serious football coach. When he was hired, he was sold as an elite strategist and program manager (codespeak for the closest thing to Saban they could get). I can think of numerous examples showing why that wasn’t the case. All four of his teams were talented. The reason none of them played for a championship was because they were sloppy, unprepared and procedurally unsound.
I’m going to give an example of a moment from Kelly’s tenure that frustrated me greatly. Nobody talks about it because it came in a game LSU won, but actual championship coaches wouldn’t allow it to happen.
In 2023, LSU and Arkansas were tied 31-31 in the fourth quarter. With no Arkansas timeouts remaining, Logan Diggs gave LSU a first down at the 7-yard line with two minutes remaining. LSU has all three timeouts, meaning they can easily kneel the ball and settle for a field goal. Now, if you don’t want to trust a college kicker, that’s understandable! The LSU offense scored touchdowns on its last four drives and is very capable of getting seven more yards and forcing the Hogs to drive the entire field one last time. What does Kelly, the guy sold on being a Saban-level strategist, do? Mix lazy runs up the middle and timeouts in such a fashion that LSU ends up leaving time on the clock after kicking the field goal. Arkansas’ hail mary was intercepted, but that doesn’t excuse the fact they never should’ve touched the ball. Kelly didn’t trust an offense that had driven 75 yards FOUR STRAIGHT TIMES to run two plays without timeouts at the end. There is no explanation for why he coaches this way.
There is no accountability with Brian Kelly. We’ve gotten so much play out of the YOU’RE SPOILED rant, which after three years of this guy was still stunning to me. Could you imagine a world where Nick Saban’s offense scored 13 points in a major rivalry game, and he said “yeah our offense is fine. You’re the one who’s stupid for complaining about it?” No, because he cared about the process. He cared about getting better every week. Poor play was unacceptable. Kelly didn’t seem to care.
In Year 1 Brian Kelly’s team had the worst special teams unit in LSU history. In Year 2 they had the worst defense in LSU history. In Year 4, the offense was, while not the outright worst in LSU history, the most disappointing one I can remember. Relative to the talent across the board, I think it’s a bigger failure than any Miles unit.
So he wasn’t great at coaching or strategy. But he at least fostered a great locker room culture and formed lifelong relationships with his playe- lol I almost made it all the way. You can say a lot of things about Coach O, but I will never forget what Joe Burrow said about him. Joe Burrow, one of the coolest, chillest, most relaxed athletes we’ve ever seen, was overcome with emotion talking about Coach O. Joe has said himself he was taken aback by the emotion he showed. And if you go back and watch that speech, there is a clear uptick when Joe gets to the Coach O segment.
Can you imagine any player talking about Brian Kelly that way? You can’t because they feel nothing for him. I’m writing this 24 hours after the news became official, and I have not seen ONE of Kelly’s former Tigers express any kind of sadness or well wishes for him. Kelly’s starting center for his first two years said he didn’t even talk to him once. Kelly allegedly never met with Greg Brooks Jr. or the family of Kyren Lacy, which says everything you need to know.
I will remember Brian Kelly as the coach who did not bring anything to the table except being annoying and unlikeable. His teams were not exceptionally physical, prepared, fast or dynamic. Aside from that one awesome QB I discussed, there was nothing remarkable about LSU the last four years. They were an NPC football team. It’s like someone asked AI to generate an Outback Bowl participant. These shortcomings will be even more painful when the players for these mid teams are NFL superstars in three years. We are not done hating this guy.
Poseur
I tried to give him a fair shake, I really did.
He was the coach, and there’s nothing I could do about it, so… I was going to give him a clean slate. Just ignore all of the noise from Notre Dame, and start fresh. We all need fresh starts in our life, and I had criticized the Orgeron hire at the time as a half-measure, just a continuation of the Miles era with a fresh coat of paint. Give ’em credit, this was a clean break.
And to be fair, I found some of the early criticism of Kelly to be grossly unfair. The fake southern accent bit was FUNNY. Of course it was phony and a put on… that was the joke. Goddammit, do we need to explain JOKES to southern Louisiana? The dorky dance moves like he is the most uncool dad on the planet… that felt honest. Don’t attempt to be cool. Be your dorky self. So those early “controversies”? Hey, I was on Kelly’s side.
And look, Orgeron burnt this program to the fucking ground. The fucking ground. Look, I’ll quote myself right before his first season because I am exactly that kind of narcissist.
Kelly, essentially, inherited 17 players. That’s insane. It was a miracle… A MIRACLE… that LSU managed to finish about 500, much less make the SEC title game. I’ll give credit, Kelly should have earned a bucketload of goodwill for that season.
But he didn’t. Why? Well, the defense sucked. But it was more than that. Kelly’s brand of football is utterly joyless. It is a thudding, depressing style… and that’s when it’s working. When it’s not working, it is the complete antithesis of what we think of LSU football: it was completely without joy or surprise. He had sucked the life from the sport.
The worst part of Kelly’s LSU tenure is not that the team was bad. It wasn’t. It was that it was irrelevant. It was boring. It was devoid of the zest for life that defines southern Louisiana. It’s okay to be bad, but to be colorless and bland? That is a sin against LSU football.
Even now, Kelly doesn’t understand what LSU football is. And that’s why he is so angry and alone.
Zach
A wise man once said: “Who’s more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?“ That man might have been the fictitious Jedi master Obi Wan Kenobi in A New Hope, but the sentiment rings true in my feelings toward Brian Kelly. I really thought it work and he’d get us to the mountaintop.
I talked to my dad on the phone Monday night for about an hour and I used the phrase “con man” to describe Kelly. I feel duped, hoodwinked, led astray, and even a little bamboozled, and Brian Kelly gets to make off with $54 million along the way. At least it’s not my own money?
I’ll admit, I went along with the whole “well if Les Miles and Ed Orgeron can win titles at LSU, SURELY Brian Kelly can!” line of thinking, and it just never materialized. I reached out to Joshua Vowles, managing editor of our Notre Dame sister site One Foot Down, Sunday morning (so after the A&M game, but maybe 8 hours or so before the firing) and I asked him “is this playing out how you thought?” and he replied “pretty much—although it’s one of the two scenarios I thought was most likely.” If other people could see it, why couldn’t I?
I’ll never understand how or why he was, supposedly, so half-assed. Maybe a younger Brian Kelly, the one that left Cincinnati for Notre Dame, is committed to the grind and leaves no stone unturned toward chasing down that elusive national championship. Instead, LSU got this version of Brian Kelly. The one who, apparently, seemed content to just count his money. If the whole “winning games” thing didn’t work out, well at least those checks are clearing, ehh Brian?
