Brian Kelly On Mississippi State's Air Raid Offense & How LSU Needs To Defend It

During his press conference on Monday, head coach Brian Kelly talked about the challenges LSU's defense will have on Saturday night trying to slow down Mississippi State's air raid offense.

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"Playing Mississippi State, I have such great respect for Coach Leach, and obviously it starts with the offense. It is a precision offense. It is extremely well coached. And, you know, there is a level of I would say patience and persistence that you need on defense, because if you're trying to disrupt it in one fashion, there are answers that they have.

The answers are tried and true and tested. So, look, this is going to come down to our guys' attention to detail. They're going to have to tackle very, very well. This really puts the tenets of really good defensive football on display.

You've got to be able to not only tackle, but be in really good positional awareness all day. Because, again, this is a scheme that in some instances -- and I'm not here to compare across the board -- but this is like triple option, right?

The precision of this scheme, the way it is set up, if you are not taking care of your assignment and doing your job, you're going to get exposed."

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Q. When you're going up against their offense, how much does conditioning and substitutions play a role when they can throw it 50, 60 times?

BRIAN KELLY: Yeah, certainly that's part of it. The tempo will be part of what we have to consider. But you're in a situation where you're in nickel and dime a lot as well, so -- and it is a hurry-up offense, but it's not something that we can't situational substitute out.

Again, I think we're kind of used to it a little bit in terms of these guys are in pretty good shape. So we feel confident there. This is really going to be about getting the right players on the field. We may look a little bit different from that perspective in terms of getting guys that can play in space.

Q. When you face a team like Mississippi State and they have so many curve balls, does that make you have to adjust the way you practice this week? Are there any sort of adjustments made on that end, or is it just practice -- try to practice more normally and make the adjustments more schematically instead of actual game day practice?

BRIAN KELLY: Yeah. That's a good question. I think perceptually that people think there is a lot of curve balls. This is dive, quarterback keep, or pitch. There is maybe four or five, six concepts what are run so well and so efficiently, that if you get too cute on defense, that's where you get exposed. Or you try to do one thing to take it away. If you play too much man. If you play too much three-man rush. If you try to be one dimensional defensively, that's where you get in trouble.

This is really about trying to change up your looks, try to make it so they don't see the same thing every time. But they're going to run what they run. They just run it better than you can defend it in three days of preparation.

Again, I go back to that -- I know you are going to get sick of the option triple option analogy, but it's so true in that this is the air raid concept. They run it better than you can defend it in three days.

So you better tackle. You better have a really good plan on some of the things that they really like to do, or you're going to get exposed.

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