LAS VEGAS — For most coaches, Week 1 is about shaking off the rust, seeing some young guys get their first reps in the game and hopefully taking care of business to start 1-0.
For LSU’s Brian Kelly, on the other hand, Week 1 has become an annual existential crisis.
Late Sunday night at Allegiant Stadium, Kelly answered questions from the media after his third straight season-opening loss at a neutral site, a 27-20 last-second heartbreaker against No. 23 USC. It didn’t take long for him to let the assembled audience know how angry he was with the result.
In fact, his very first words were, “This is the first time since I’ve been here (at LSU) that I’ve been mad at my football team.” He then mentioned a pair of costly, unsportsmanlike late-game penalties by his players and the Tigers’ inability to close out the game.
A few minutes later, while answering a follow-up question, Kelly slammed his first on the table, bringing a few sleepy sportswriters back to maximum alert as his voice abruptly rose.
“We’re sitting here AGAIN talking about the same things, about not finishing when you have an opponent in a position to put them away,” Kelly said. “What we do on the sidelines is feel like the game is over. And I’m like that angry about it, that I have to do something about it. I don’t do my job well enough as a coach. I have to coach them better because it is unacceptable that we have not found a way to win this football match.
“Are ridiculous.”
To reiterate: this was after the first game of the season.
Kelly’s team actually played pretty well on Sunday night. This wasn’t the disastrous 2022 Florida State game in New Orleans, Kelly’s LSU debut, when the Tigers committed every special teams snafu imaginable and lost 24-23 on a blocked extra point. This wasn’t the ugly 2023 rematch with FSU in Orlando, either, when the Noles ran away in the second half of a 45-24 loss.
This was a down-to-earth battle between two teams trying to find themselves after losing their respective Heisman-winning quarterbacks (USC’s Caleb Williams and LSU’s Jayden Daniels). Lincoln Riley’s Trojans showed a much-improved defense, one that essentially envelopes ball carriers and limits explosive play. Kelly’s defense, itself a train wreck for most of last season, allowed a less than stellar 7.5 yards per play but had improved enough for the Tigers to maintain a 17-13 lead late in the fourth quarter.
Then the dam broke.
After stopping a USC fourth down in LSU territory with 8:38 to go, LSU safety Major Burns committed a 15-yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that put the Tigers at their own 21. You could see Kelly had a long conversation with Burns on the sidelines afterward. LSU went three-and-out and punted back to USC. Three plays later, Trojans quarterback Miller Moss threw a beautiful 28-yard touchdown pass to Ja’Kobi Lane to put USC up 20-17 with 5:44 left.
Tigers quarterback Garrett Nussmeier, who finished 29 of 38 for 304 yards, led his team from its own 20 to the USC 14 but missed a wide-open Aaron Anderson for what would have been at least another first-down loss. The Tigers settled for a 31-yard field goal with 1:47 remaining.
You probably know how it ended.
USC seemed content to settle for a game-winning field goal attempt until Moss found receiver Kyron Hudson for a spectacular 20-yard catch down the sideline, which, combined with a targeted call on LSU’s Jardin Gilbert, moved the Trojans to the LSU 13. with 18 seconds left.
At that moment, USC tailback Woody Marks took a handoff up the middle for the winning score, and Kelly got that familiar crumpled look on his face that always looks like half-bewilderment, half-resignation.
annual tweet pic.twitter.com/5qCSxnHTAa
— no context college football (@nocontextcfb) September 2, 2024
“Obviously when we go into a match we don’t know how to handle ourselves,” Kelly said afterwards. “You have to have that killer instinct in this game. You have to put teams aside. We had a chance to put this team aside, and we got complacent.”
Normally in these moments the coach reminds us that there is still a long season ahead of them, that they have plenty of time to solve their problems, etc., etc. Since I haven’t heard from Kelly about that, I feel forced me to personally remind LSU’s coach: Hey man, it’s a long season ahead. You have plenty of time to resolve these issues. Don’t worry too much.
Unfortunately, he has already done that.
“To be the kind of football team I want, we have to eliminate the silly mistakes,” he said. “We have to have a mentality of, when we have an opponent, we have that killer instinct. And we have to play off each other much better.”
Did we mention his team has only played one game?
GO DEEPER
2024 College Football Playoff Projections: Miami in, LSU out of our 12-team bracket
Kelly made an interesting comment while complaining that the Tigers weren’t playing complementary football. He said: “We’re putting way too much pressure on our defense to be something they’re not ready for. They fought, but we have warts and they won’t go away overnight.’
It brought back memories of Kelly’s surprisingly candid comments after the transfer portal closed in the spring without LSU adding defensive tackles as many expected. “We are not in the market for buying players,” Kelly told WAFB-TV: That sounded like a preemptive excuse to some if the Tigers’ defense, which ranked 109th in the FBS last season, wasn’t noticeably better.
His comments Sunday night felt like he was pleasantly surprised that the defense had pulled off a Lincoln Riley offense, with Moss and ridiculous receivers Zachariah Branch, Hudson and Lane, to “only” three touchdowns, but that still wasn’t enough.
“I thought our defense took a step forward from last year,” he said. “But we also have to help them. We can’t be three-and-out and then put them back on the field.”
This moment happened in 2024, but it might as well have been 2014, or almost any year after that. Kelly has won at least 10 games in each of the past seven seasons as a head coach (five with the Irish, two at LSU), yet these big-game disappointments feel less like exceptions and more like the norm.
Notre Dame fans mostly made peace with it because the Irish hadn’t even had this much success in decades. LSU, on the other hand, has seen its past three coaches win national championships (and still fired the past two). Tigers fans, who took over Las Vegas only to be let down again, won’t show the same patience if this continues.
No punches or harsh words will reassure them.
(Photo: Candice Ward/Getty Images)
