On Saturday night, Brian Kelly will coach his 41st game at LSU under the very real specter that his 10-year, $95 million contract will turn out to be one of the most breathtaking flops in college football history.
It doesn’t have to end that way, of course. It shouldn’t end that way — not with the roster Kelly has finally put together as he begins his fourth season and the swagger he’s projecting in every public utterance heading into the No. 9 LSU’s opener at No. 4 Clemson.
“This is a team we were very intentional about in terms of going out and getting mature players that can stand up to those [environments],” Kelly said Monday at his weekly news conference. “We’re not going into a game where we can’t handle the moment.”
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But through three years, it’s fair to ask whether Kelly has handled both the moment and the opportunity to coach in the SEC, unchained from the cultural limitations he clearly thought had prevented him from taking the final step to a national title at Notre Dame.
The results say he hasn't.
In Kelly’s first season at LSU, the Tigers were ranked No. 5 heading into Thanksgiving with a plausible opportunity to make the College Football Playoff. Since then, they’re 15-9 against power conference opponents with a 2-7 record against teams ranked in the AP Top 25.
Though Kelly has a buyout north of $50 million after this season, which might protect him for at least one more year, it’s not a stretch to say that the first three weeks of this season — with Saturday’s opener at Clemson and a Sept. 13 home game against Florida — will be the most pressure-packed games he’s coached in since 2017 when Notre Dame was coming off a 4-8 record.
At the end of the day, LSU fans aren’t going to accept a fourth straight year of irrelevance in the national championship picture.
“Building a program unfortunately takes some time, and the time element nobody wants to hear about,” Kelly said this week. “I get it. I understand everybody wants to win the national championship this year. I want to win it as well. But the reality is, we had some work to do and that work was building a foundational piece in this program that was built on consistency and high standards on a day-to-day basis.”
But the tried-and-true strategy of blaming the predecessor, as usual, doesn’t tell the full story of why LSU has underachieved after spending big to hire one of the most well-established and consistent coaches in college football.
While there was indeed some cultural rot and talent rebuilding to do on the heels of Ed Orgeron’s 2021 crashout, sources with direct insight into the LSU program painted a much different picture in conversations this week with Yahoo Sports.
Among the issues that emerged were an initial confusion in Kelly’s first two years about both the importance and difficulty of recruiting New Orleans, which left him scrambling to reassert dominance in one of the most talent-rich areas of the country; a mishandling of key coaching staff decisions that led to disastrous results on defense; and an institutional arrogance early in the NIL era about what it would cost to keep the same pipeline of talent flowing to Baton Rouge that had lifted the program to prominence.
“Give Brian credit — it’s not like he’s mismanaged any games,” one source told Yahoo Sports. “They just haven’t had it all put together at the same time.”
LSU famously won national titles under three straight coaches before Kelly, making the job arguably as attractive as any in the country. When athletics director Scott Woodward lured Kelly after 12 years and a trio of top-five finishes at Notre Dame, it would be disingenuous to say the expectation was anything less than winning championships.
One source whose assessment of Kelly’s performance leaned more charitably put much of the blame on LSU, and by extension LSU donors, being slow to arm him with the same NIL resources as some of the more aggressive spenders in the SEC.
On the SEC coaches’ teleconference this week, Kelly framed star quarterback recruit Bryce Underwood’s decision last November to flip from LSU to Michigan (with the fulcrum, of course, being a huge NIL package) as something of a wake-up call.
A $1 million donation by Kelly to the school’s scholarship fund sparked a more than $3 million boost in NIL-related donations, which led directly to LSU finishing No. 2 in On3’s transfer portal rankings. Kelly put LSU’s roster cost this year at $18 million — a huge increase from where the Tigers had been previously.
“In this new model, you have to be able to adapt to current circumstances and certainly that was one big one that we had to address and adapt to,” Kelly said. “Look, at the end of the day, it was our fan base that stepped up and said, ‘We need to be part of this.’”
The question, though, is whether LSU’s talent infusion around highly regarded quarterback Garrett Nussmeier will work quickly enough to patch over some of the original sins in his tenure that exposed a lack of understanding about the job he had taken.
“He didn’t give Corey Raymond the time of day when he got the job,” said one source, referring to the longtime defensive backs coach and Louisiana native who had recruited and coached a long list of elite players at that position under both Les Miles and Ed Orgeron. Though Kelly corrected that mistake when he brought Raymond back in 2024 after two years at Florida — and, not surprisingly, the talent level in LSU’s defensive backfield has risen considerably — it underscored what a poor job he did evaluating the kind of coaching staff he needed to succeed at LSU.
And those questions persist.
After two years of struggling badly on defense — a reality made all the more painful by the fact that Jayden Daniels broke all kinds of quarterbacking records in 2023 for a team that spent one week in the top 10 of the rankings — Kelly had to overhaul his staff.
Sources said Woodward, the athletics director, was the impetus behind luring defensive coordinator Blake Baker from Missouri and making him the highest-paid assistant in the country last year at $2.5 million. But Baker’s track record is also thin, including last season when LSU’s improvement on defense was marginal from allowing 6.14 yards per play to 5.88, the third-worst in the SEC.
Meanwhile, offensive coordinator Joe Sloan is also unproven, having been elevated to the position when veteran coordinator Mike Denbrock went back to Notre Dame after the 2023 season.
Though LSU’s offense was statistically solid last year under Sloan, ranking in the top half of the SEC in most metrics, one source said there were “a lot of growing pains” for a 38-year-old whose only previous coordinator experience was two seasons at Louisiana Tech for teams that went 5-5 and 3-9.
And on special teams, where LSU has operated at a significant deficit during the Kelly era, he made the curious decision this year not to hire a special teams coach. Instead, he hired Aman Anand from Grambling as a senior analyst guiding that unit.
Maybe all these moves will eventually work out, especially now that LSU has put a more focused effort behind talent acquisition. But it’s undeniably a bit of a Frankenstein staff that doesn’t completely make sense from an experience standpoint and has practically no history with Kelly outside of strength and conditioning coach Jake Flint.
And there’s simply not much time to get it right.
If LSU goes into Clemson and wins on Saturday, the narrative of course will change completely for at least a little while. But if it’s a fourth straight year under Kelly digging out of an 0-1 hole, with that all-important Florida game coming quickly, LSU fans are going to demand consequences instead of explanations.
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