Brian Kelly needs only eight victories in 2025 to reach 300 for his career, a massive number achieved by only five other major-college football coaches, but don’t you ever think eight is enough for LSU. The man they call “BK” flirted with that figure last season and now finds himself approaching his fourth year with the Tigers as the occasional subject of “hot seat” debates.
Yeah, they got after him on ESPN at halftime of the Kansas State-Iowa State game that was the first significant matchup of the season. It was one way to promote No. 9 LSU’s massive opener at No. 4 Clemson on Saturday at 7:30 p.m.: amplifying the supposed consequences of the outcome.
There will be no serious effort to replace Kelly absent an abject disaster in the LSU program. His buyout is almost Jimboesque at this point.
We do not have time now for nuance in American sports, though. That always was an elusive goal, but it has been discarded in its entirety. We do not have time for growth. There only is failure and success, and the margin can be so capricious one can wind up in both categories (losing a fourth consecutive game to an archrival, say, and then winning four in a row to become national champion) in the space of two months.
MORE: Against the spread picks for Week 1's Top 25 games
“Building a program, unfortunately, takes some time. And the time element nobody wants to hear about,” Kelly said this week at his pre-Clemson press conference. “I get it. I understand everybody’s wanting to win the national championship this year. I want to win it as well. But, the reality is, we had some work to do. And that work was building a foundational piece in this program that was built on consistency and high standards on a day-to-day basis. And so that takes some time.”
Brian Kelly's LSU tenure has been a success
If you listen to some of the conversation around LSU football – and there is plenty, given the 24-hour SEC Network, the horde of media devoted to covering the league and, now, the “SEC Football: Any Given Saturday” documentary series on Netflix – you might be convinced Kelly’s first three seasons in Baton Rouge were a disappointment.
His first team, in 2022, went 10-4 and reached the SEC Championship game. His second wound up 10-3 and enjoyed the spectacle of Jayden Daniels, a Kelly transfer import who won LSU’s second Heisman Trophy in 64 years. His third team finished 9-4 and in a cluster of six teams tied for fourth in the conference. All three of those Tigers teams won a bowl game.
During Kelly’s time in the league, only Georgia (22) and Alabama (19) have won more SEC games than the Tigers (17). His .708 winning percentage in conference is the best of any LSU coach since Bill Arnsparger’s short stay in the 1980s. Indeed, that includes three coaches who won national championships, including the great Nick Saban.
There are prominent media voices, regardless, declaring LSU needs a College Football Playoff appearance soon, real soon, even though the Tigers got there just once since the CFP’s introduction in 2014, and the expanded, 12-team field was introduced only last season.
| Season | SEC | Overall | Final ranking |
| 2024 | 5-3 | 9-4 | unranked |
| 2023 | 6-2 | 10-3 | 12 |
| 2022 | 6-2 | 10-4 | 16 |
“The slogan, ‘It just means more’ is very real in this part of the country,” SEC Network analyst Cole Cubelic told The Sporting News. “I say all the time when I go other places and people say, ‘What’s different about the SEC?’ I’m like, ‘Listen, we love to hate more than we love to love.’ That’s a big difference … and sometimes that’s our own team and our own people, unfortunately.”
In part because of Kelly’s ability to direct winning football teams, the horrendous state of the program he took over has been too quickly forgotten. LSU produced a spectacular championship team in 2019, 15-0 with a Heisman for Joe Burrow, but then won 11 games combined in 2020 and 2021. Recruiting had imploded.
“He’s had to dig out of a hole here left by Ed Orgeron,” veteran columnist Ron Higgins of the Shreveport Bossier Journal told SN. “Orgeron left him with 37 scholarship players. And his biggest mistake was his first year, he beat Alabama and went to the SEC Championship game, and everybody thought they were on their way. But they still had problems. Most of them were defensively – all of them were defensively.”
Follow The Sporting News on WhatsApp
With Daniels throwing to first-round wideouts Brian Thomas and Malik Nabors, LSU led the nation in scoring in 2023, at 45.5 points per game. But they ranked 82nd in points allowed. The three teams to defeat the Tigers that year averaged 47.3 points. Kelly responded by changing his entire defensive coaching staff.
“One thing I’ve discovered about him: When he sees that something’s gone wrong, he will go all-out to fix it,” Higgins said. “Some people might fire the coordinator; he fired the whole defensive staff.
“You can tell he’s very sure of himself and what he’s doing. He kind of reminds me of Nick, somewhat, in that they’ve been around a long time and they have a system and they know what they’re doing. But he’s also had to adapt to NIL, and LSU was really NIL-poor. Then they rounded up some major donors and got a campaign together, and now they can compete.
“The second year, he made some bad portal purchases, and it really hurt him: bad defensive back purchases, got three or four transfers and none of them panned out … and the defense couldn’t stop anybody.”
None of his three seasons has begun brightly. LSU schedules formed in advance of Kelly’s arrival have put the Tigers into the arena with major opponents each time. Perhaps last year’s neutral site game against a middling batch of Southern California Trojans should not have been so daunting, but no one will say that about this weekend’s visit to Clemson.
MORE: Viewer's guide to a blockerbuster opening weekend
“We’ve been working on this since January,” Kelly said. “After the Baylor win, the bowl game, we went to work on our roster, our process in developing this football team so that when we get to these moments it’s having a team that’s confident, that plays the game the right way in a hostile environment. You would say composure, maturity, and they have to play with great competitiveness.
“When you’re putting together the DNA of a football team, it’s not just about talent acquisition. It’s making sure you have the pieces necessary to compete in those moments: When there’s a turnover, when there’s a sudden change, when momentum’s not going your way, what’s the makeup of your team? I like the makeup.”
Why Brian Kelly is perceived as a CFB villain
Because he has been caught on camera yelling at his players on the sideline, often with statements that contain profanity, because his countenance transforms into a scowl with ease and agility and maybe because the progression of his career ran outside the norm, Kelly has been installed as one of those college coaches nationally viewed as a villain.
One might have expected college sports in general and football in particular to grow beyond such concocted designations after we saw what became not long ago of this sport’s grandest media-engendered hero – I don’t need to spell that out for you, do I? -- but reveling in a heel’s struggles has an irresistible allure.
“The level of dislike for him puzzles me,” Higgins told SN. “He has a dry sense of humor; he’s funny. You ask him a question, you get a really good answer most of the time. He was the first one in the SEC to release injury reports. He’s accessible; he’s opened his practices up more than any LSU coach ever had. It puzzles me.”
MORE: Sporting News 2025 Preseason All-America Team
Along with the Twitter antipathy for Kelly, there’s a legitimate element that has led to impatience with his progress in Baton Rouge: how much more quickly he revolutionized the previous two programs he entered.
When I covered Cincinnati football in 1999, the program was announcing crowds of 17,000 or so when there were fewer than half as many in the stands. How could that be? In order to get season tickets to see Kenyon Martin and the basketball Bearcats, you also had to purchase football season tickets. That didn’t mean you had to use them.
It still was a lot like that when Kelly was hired in advance of the 2007 season, Cincinnati’s third in the Big East. He showed up at the conference media day “clambake” in Newport, R.I., and discovered not a single media member from his market in attendance. No writers. No TV crews. Nobody. He used his time at the microphone to harangue the city’s news organizations for failing to show. I sat on my couch and chuckled: He would learn. This was Bearcats football, not something important.
In his second season, they won the Big East, earned a top 25 ranking and every UC home game drew approached a capacity crowd at Nippert Stadium. In his third season, the Bearcats recorded an undefeated regular season, became the hottest ticket in the city and earned their second consecutive major bowl bid. Cincinnati’s eventual invitation to join the Big 12 Conference can be traced directly to that day on the New England shore.
At Notre Dame, the Irish had six seasons of .500 or worse and three failed coaches in the 13 years after Lou Holtz left in 1996. In Kelly’s third year, 2012, Notre Dame went 12-0 in the regular season and played in the BCS Championship game. They made two College Football Playoff appearances in his final eight years, which included six seasons of double-digit wins.
LSU fans would have liked to see their program rocket forward in Year 3, as well. But the SEC presents a more challenging landscape, and so does the whole of college football in 2025 (and ’24, and ’23, etc.)
“I just think it’s the landscape of college football today. I don’t think there’s a true roadmap for what’s going to work collectively for across the sport, be it conference to conference, team to team, program to program,” Cubelic said. “There’s so many different things based on your donor base, based on the state that you live in, now laws and regulations that can be put in place, how the SEC has changed since he’s been the head coach there. It’s just been such a moving target.
“If you attack one position or one player and it doesn’t work or does happen, and all of a sudden the rules change and you have to go in a different direction – it’s just a tough balancing act right now.”
Kelly’s presence on the front porch of the 300-victory club needs to be recognized for the achievement it is. The gentlemen already there are names any student of college football history never could forget, among them Bobby Bowden, Bear Bryant, Pop Warner, Amos Alonzo Stagg. With his next win, Kelly will break free from a tie with Saban at 292 career wins.
Kelly has not won a Division I championship, but Grand Valley State of Michigan went back-to-back at the Division II level in Kelly’s final two years there, 2002 and 2003. When Sports Illustrated ranked him just 17th on its list of the top college football coaches of the century – behind Chip Kelly and his 81 victories, really? – it officially became fair to wonder if he is the sport’s most underrated coach.
MORE: SN ranks 2025 CFB head coaches, from 1-136
Higgins essentially grew up on the LSU campus as the son of a Tigers athletics publicist, then returned home a half-dozen years ago after a newspaper career that took him to Mobile, Memphis and Jackson, Miss. He knows the program better than most and remains impressed by Kelly’s work.
“He’s been recruiting great. He’s had to build this thing, had to adapt to NIL,” Higgins said. “When I hear people talk about moving on, I tell them: Who are you going to hire that’s better? You’re not. First of all, you get a coach from Notre Dame – and nobody ever does that. And he’s good.
“I just think he’s going to win a national championship eventually. He’s going to get them to the playoff eventually. Because he does too many things right.”