LSU football coach Brian Kelly is an interesting coach to cover. He always has something intelligent to say, which has not always been the case with five of the previous six LSU football coaches.
We may not always agree with him. But he has something to say, and it’s usually candid and true. He’s not just winging it, making stuff up, and spinning.
On Saturday night, though, after a 44-21 “win” over Nicholls State in which the Tigers took a step backward after a step forward the previous week in a loss to USC, Kelly messed up.
“Look, each week is a week in itself,” he began. “So, be careful, about the narratives of, ‘This team is this. This team is that,'” he said.
Uh, excuse me. Is that some kind of a Kim Mulkey-like, control warning?
Coaches love to control everything. For the most part, it helps them succeed. The greatest coach of any sport in LSU history and in college football history, Nick Saban, tried to control many things. He did not try to control the media. He made suggestions, but he didn’t warn us about a narrative he wanted to control.
Coach Kelly, you coach the football team. You talk about the team in any way you want and stress whatever you want. But I’ll take care of the narrative. That’s my job, and that of other members of the media.
There are plenty of issues with your team to coach up before you even think of any narrative. If each week of a football season “is a week in itself,” as you say, then this week, your team sucks.
You can’t even dominate a 6-5, Football Championship (FCS) subdivision school like Nicholls State! The Colonels pushing LSU around the line of scrimmage and rushing for 150 yards Saturday night is analogous to a great high school football team pushing Nicholls around the line of scrimmage and rushing for 150 yards. No wonder you want to call the narrative.
You can’t even run for more than a 3.0-yard average against Nicholls State. Your best offensive lineman – junior left tackle Will Campbell – already has three false start penalties.
You said you didn’t run the ball more because of a numbers disadvantage by alignment at times. That makes sense if you’re playing Alabama. You’re playing Nicholls. Run anyway.
Your defense has a new coordinator in Blake Baker, but against the Colonels, it returned to the Dixie Chicks Defense of Matt House and Bo Pelini, as in that “Wide Open Spaces” song.
Your defense made 5-foot-11, 205-pound Collin Guggenheim look like Arkansas’ Darren McFadden.
Your press conference was truthful, but embarrassing.
“They were physical,” Kelly said of Nicholls State in his opening statement of a team outmanned, outweighed and out-recruited. Twice more over the next few sentences, Kelly said, “They were physical” of this tiny FCS school. Was this Alabama in 2011?
And suddenly South Carolina looks as big as Alabama on the Tigers’ schedule. The Gamecocks are 2-0 on the season and 1-0 in the SEC after slapping around a Kentucky team that was an 8-point favorite by 31-6 in Lexington. Kickoff is at 11 a.m. central time on ABC in Columbia.
South Carolina collected five sacks and held the Wildcats to 183 yards. Kentucky is not known for offense, but South Carolina is not known for anything much in college football. It was the lowest yardage total allowed by the Gamecocks since Eastern Illinois managed only 109 in 2021.
The Gamecocks have a virtual unknown quarterback in redshirt freshman LaNorris Sellers, who signed in 2023 as the 246th prospect overall in the nation and No. 16 quarterback. He only completed 11 of 15 passes for 159 yards and two touchdowns with an interception Saturday. Then again, who had heard of Collin Guggenheim before Saturday night? Other than the museum in Manhattan, that is. LSU better treat him like he’s Jaxson Dart.
LSU is an 8.5-point favorite. Why, I do not know. Then again, LSU also did not deserve to move up two spots to No. 16 in the Associated Press poll on Sunday. I’m also wondering why ESPN chose this game to place its College GameDay spectacular on Saturday.
This is a South Carolina team that barely beat Old Dominion, 23-19, in its opener and trailed 19-16 midway in the fourth quarter. Old Dominion went 6-7 last year.
What we don’t know is how good or bad Kentucky is. South Carolina could be really bad, too, and it just beat another bad team last week. And what do we know about LSU? Maybe it will beat South Carolina by double digits.
Kelly doesn’t know for sure, but he did say something very cryptically smart after the game Saturday.
“We’ve got to get to complementary football,” he said. “If that doesn’t happen soon, we will be talking about things we don’t want to talk about.”
Yeah, like your suddenly slipping future, if you lose at South Carolina.
A week ago, I thought No. 6 Ole Miss (2-0) on Oct. 12 in Tiger Stadium would be the crossroads game of the season. Now, it’s South Carolina, which clearly looked better than LSU last week.
Welcome to the 2024 LSU season, folks, this Saturday in Columbia. Complementary football would be great, but Kelly just needs to make sure his team and its narrative does not suck again against a team that may as well.
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