re: Brian Kelly was never right for LSU

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on him as some colossal failure are

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Well, he was fired right as things were starting to bottom out. I don’t think we need to pretend we don’t know where this was headed — another year under Kelly and that roster/program was likely going to be in significantly worse shape.

And given the contract, the resources he had, and the expectations when he was hired, I don’t know how you can describe his tenure as anything other than a failure relative to what LSU hired him to do. That doesn’t mean literally nothing good happened. The 2022 Alabama win was awesome. Daniels was a phenomenal evaluation and became a Heisman winner (though that Heisman run was largely unenjoyable due to the shite show that was that D). Kelly deserves credit for both. But we’re also giving him an awful lot of credit for stabilizing a roster and winning games at LSU while paying him $100 million to compete for championships.

My bigger issue with the “NIL and portal passed the old guy by” defense is that his problems went way beyond NIL and the portal. He wasn’t just an old-school coach who refused to embrace perpetual free agency. The staff construction was questionable, player evaluations were often poor, and development was inconsistent. At times it honestly felt like they were letting recruiting rankings do a lot of the scouting for them — get highly rated guys on campus and figure the rest out later.

And maybe the most damning part is how consistently unprepared and sloppy his teams could look. Penalties, special-teams disasters, defensive breakdowns, slow starts, poor situational football — those aren’t NIL problems. Those are head-coaching problems.

That’s where the Saban comparison loses me too. Saban may have hated what college football was becoming, but he adapted to massive changes in the sport for 15+ years and kept winning at the highest level until he decided he was done. Kelly didn’t leave because he’d conquered the old version of the sport and didn’t feel like conquering the new one. LSU fired him because the program wasn’t meeting expectations.

I’m perfectly willing to give Kelly credit for 2022, for Daniels, and for helping pull LSU out of the mess he inherited. But those things don’t erase everything that followed. He was hired and paid like an elite championship coach, and ultimately he didn’t build an elite championship program.

And I don’t think saying that requires rewriting history or “shitting on” the guy. There’s a pretty reasonable middle ground between pretending his entire tenure was worthless and retroactively treating a few great moments as proof the overall tenure was successful.