He has that look again, the unmistakable sight of a man who just swallowed a bag of knives. Along with another L.
Good news: Brian Kelly has been here before, and fought his way out of it at Notre Dame with wildly successful changes.
Bad news: it’s a completely different college football world, one that looks nothing like it did a mere eight years ago.
“When things don’t go well, the head coach has to be more involved,” Kelly said. “It doesn’t mean I don’t trust, but the buck stops with me.”
Because when things don’t go well in the meatgrinder SEC, you’re one step away from the unraveling of it all.
In no world did Kelly see LSU with four losses entering the final two weeks of the season. By any metric, it’s an unmitigated disaster.
But this isn’t about Kelly blowing up at wide receiver Chris Hilton Jr., for not being coachable, or any postgame rant about trying to get this team to finish games. That’s easily digestible and identifiable — to say nothing of over reactionary — low-hanging fruit.
This runs much deeper.
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LSU isn’t tough enough. And by tough, I don’t mean physically tough.
A tough team doesn’t run 92 plays on offense against Florida, and score 16 points. A tough team doesn’t give up seven sacks to a team that had 19 sacks in the previous nine games.
A tough team doesn’t get outscored 31-6 in the second half of a critical SEC road game against Texas A&M, and 100-35 in their last 10 quarters on the field ― leading to three consecutive losses.
A tough team doesn’t score 35 points in 10 quarters with an offense Kelly said in July could be better than last year’s group — one that produced a Heisman Trophy winner at quarterback, and two NFL first-round draft picks at wide receiver.
A tough team isn’t last in the SEC in rushing offense, and 13th of 16 teams in scoring defense.
Nothing about this season looks good. Not the results, not the game plans from new offensive and defensive coordinators Joe Sloan and Blake Baker, not the effort.
Not the pass protection from an offensive line that has two projected first-round picks (OTs Will Campbell, Emery Jones Jr.), not the half-game suspension of star senior edge defender Bradyn Swinson to start the Florida game for ‘not meeting team standards.’
Not the lack of a consistent run game, not a pass-to-run ratio of 428-to-286, a completely one-sided game plan (60 percent passes) that makes LSU easier to defend.
When the 2016 season at Notre Dame began to unravel, the culprits were easy to see: the Irish weren’t good enough on the lines of scrimmage, and didn’t have a difference-maker at the most important position on the field.
But the one lasting memory from that four-win season is Kelly on the sidelines, red-faced and furious and proclaiming numerous times during the season that the Irish simply weren’t tough enough.
Hello, LSU.
The interior of the LSU offensive line gets pushed around, and receivers aren’t making contested catches. One receiver, apparently, is uncoachable.
This, of course, has led the pitchforks on social media to come at Kelly — because the mean man is coaching a player hard.
I’m gonna puke.
This is big-boy football, with big-boy consequences. If Kelly doesn’t get it fixed, he’ll be sent packing with a large gift of walkaway money.
If players don’t perform at a high level, they won’t play and they’ll eventually transfer (and try to earn more money) and maybe it will work at a different school. Or maybe it won’t.
Football, at its core, is a game of want and will. Notre Dame got better in 2017 because it got physically and mentally tougher, and faster on the field.
We can argue if LSU has the right coordinators, and if they’re putting players in position to play at a high level. Kelly will make that decision at the end of the season.
But LSU doesn’t have a player talent problem. It has a want and will problem.
When Kelly got it turned at Notre Dame, he got deep in the weeds and involved with everything in the program. Full-blown micromanagement.
Months before the 2017 season, Kelly told me he wasn’t coaching Notre Dame like he coached at his previous stops, where he won national titles in the NCAA lower division, and turned around the programs at Central Michigan and Cincinnati.
He had his hands on everything there. But because Notre Dame is such an unwieldy beast on and off the field, he delegated.
It all changed in 2017, and the Irish won 10 games after that disastrous four-win season. A year later, they were in the College Football Playoff — and had five consecutive double-digit win seasons before Kelly left for LSU.
He won’t get that much time to fight his way out this at LSU.
“I have to be more involved in what’s going on,” Kelly said. ‘I have to be able to figure out how we can help our players get through this.”
Or he’ll eventually be swallowing more L’s on the way out of town.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.
