Another telling sign of how disliked BK is…

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Quin Hillyer: Scold that Tiger! Why LSU was wrong to fire football coach Brian Kelly

On the matter of LSU firing head coach Brian Kelly, this might be the most unpopular column I ever write, which in itself will prove the column’s point.

So, to get right to that point: LSU was wrong to fire Kelly mid-season, the fan base was wrong to demand a mid-season firing and the state’s populace has its priorities screwed up if it cares more about the status of the football coach than about the search for a university president.


And no, I refuse to go into a witness protection program for writing this.

To be clear, from what I’ve seen of Kelly, I’m not in the least bit a fan of his. The following thoughts are based on principle, not on the person involved.

Moreover, the judgment about the wrongness of the firing has little, but not nothing, to do with the team’s record. About those results, suffice it to say that a 5-3 mid-season record (and a 71% winning percentage overall since Kelly’s arrival), with all three of this year’s losses coming to teams in the top 10 in the nation, should not be a fireable offense even in terms of wins and losses. To think otherwise is to be, well, spoiled rotten. All four of the next opponents, including 4th-ranked Alabama, are eminently beatable, and even winning three out of those four could leave LSU having defeated all its opponents except those in the top 10.


Even apart from that, mid-year firings in college are classless. (Pun not intended until I realized what I had written.) One way or another, even with overpaid, over-coddled players selling themselves to the highest bidder, the fact is that the players are still barely adults and they supposedly have chosen programs they think best for their holistic development. The identity of the coach plays a major role in their choice of college, which means ousting the coach midseason leaves those players bereft of the leader they specifically chose for a very formative year (or more) of their lives.


A coach caught cheating should be fired. A coach whose players don’t even pretend to go to class should be fired. And maybe, at season’s end and with time to reflect, a coach running a clean program who just doesn’t win enough for the fan base or isn’t the “right fit” for the school might be within reason to fire. But absent a scandal or a dereliction of duty, a mid-year firing merely “feeds the beast” of frenzied obsession with college football and of unreasonably high demands, without any nod to decent values much less to educational mission.


And if that makes me a hopeless romantic stuck in the 1920s instead of the 2020s, so be it: Virtues and standards and educational values are important in and of themselves, no matter how regularly they are ignored or trampled in today’s world.

Then there’s the matter of finances. LSU will owe Kelly $54 million, all for not coaching another down for the college. It owed former coach Ed Orgeron $17 million when it fired him. Because funds are in most senses fungible, one way or another this is effectively public money. Paying coaches $71 million to not coach is an irresponsible use of state dollars. To save that waste, why not wait a week to see if Kelly could pull an upset over Alabama? Examples are legion of coaches being on the proverbial “hot seat,” only to rise like phoenixes from the ashes to go on to championships and greatness.


Sorry for all the clichés, but LSU’s administration should have taken a chill pill at least until season’s end, and the university’s fan base should have ordered chill pills from every pharmacy in the state. The firing of Kelly was panicky, tawdry, and ethically and fiscally imprudent.

Forget “Tiger Bait.” This rash firing is, and long will linger as, an entirely disreputable Tiger Taint.

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He may seriously be the most hated figure across the world of sports.

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Ok. So this guy is a moron and has no idea what he’s talking about. Taking out the buyout portion, I bet he doesn’t even know that the vast majority of the football coaches salary comes from TAF and not public money

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Quin Hillyer

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He's being humiliated on a national stage and I couldn't be happier

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Tiger Taint.

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Quin Hillyer

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