Brian Kelly: "We are not the football team I thought we were. This is a total failure."

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ORLANDO, Fla. – After Florida State ripped LSU apart, the shredding continued in a postgame news conference that bordered on shocking.

Brian Kelly laid bare LSU football’s failures, sparing no one from his blistering rebuke. He called out himself, his staff and his team in an unrestrained way not often heard from a college coach after a loss in hostile environment to a top-10 opponent.

"We certainly are not the football team I thought we were," Kelly said Sunday after No. 5 LSU’s 45-24 loss to No. 8 Florida State, "and we’ve got to do a much better job, obviously, in developing our football team. We clearly were short in a lot of areas tonight, and that falls on me."

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"This is a total failure," he said, "from a coaching standpoint and a player standpoint that we have to obviously address and we have to own."

Kelly described his team as a bunch of imposters.

"We thought we were the two-time defending national champion Georgia Bulldogs or something," he said. "I don’t know what we thought, but we were mistaken."

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I probably shouldn’t bother with a defense of LSU, because its own coach offered none, but I will say, this matchup of talent-rich teams was competitive for more than three quarters. A failure to execute in a few critical fourth-down situations meant LSU left more than a few points out there.

But the cold truth is FSU whupped LSU at the lines of scrimmage, FSU quarterback Jordan Travis outplayed LSU’s Jayden Daniels, FSU's wide receivers outplayed LSU’s, and LSU’s secondary looked like the liability that Kelly had warned it might be.

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