Copyright Baton Rouge Advocate
Inside an area of the home locker room designated for the head coach, Brian Kelly met with top LSU athletic officials after a 49-25 loss to Texas A&M to discuss the future of the team. They asked what changes Kelly would make on offense after losing three of the previous four games, the latest a second-half collapse that emptied out Tiger Stadium. Afterward, they agreed to meet again Sunday inside Kelly's office at the practice facility. Entering the day, several people connected to the program expected LSU to make offensive staff changes, most likely the firing of offensive coordinator Joe Sloan. But by the end of the meeting, LSU had made a decision on Kelly himself. There was a sense among officials that Kelly could not turn around the team, and sources involved in the decision said he did not have enough internal support. He was informed then of the intention to fire him. Discussions were held over the rest of the day, including about his nearly $54 million buyout, that culminated in a meeting with decision-makers at the governor’s mansion Sunday night. “We weren’t getting better,” an LSU athletic official said. “This can’t happen at LSU.” In the midst of his fourth season, Kelly was out. He boasted LSU had the best roster of his tenure after a significant financial investment, and the year began with expectations of College Football Playoff contention. Instead, LSU dropped to 5-3 with the loss to Texas A&M. Kelly had a 34-14 record, results that didn’t match the size of his 10-year, $95 million contract. When Kelly came to LSU in December 2021, he never had been fired in three-plus decades as a head coach. He left Notre Dame as the winningest coach in school history with 113 victories, and he believed LSU could help him capture his first FBS national championship. After all, the Tigers’ previous three head coaches all won national titles by their fourth seasons. “He built his success at Notre Dame off of his traits of excellence and his total preparation, as he calls it, and that's kind of the thing that undermined him,” a former member of the LSU athletic department said, “because he was too married to what had worked for him at Notre Dame and not open-minded enough to what would work for him at LSU.” The Advocate spoke to 15 people connected to the LSU program over the past four years. They were granted anonymity in order to speak freely. Kelly has not spoken publicly since he was fired, and former LSU athletic director Scott Woodward, who parted ways with the university Thursday, did not respond to a request for comment. Most of the people who spent time in the program who were interviewed for this story said they enjoyed individual interactions with Kelly when they had them. At the same time, they described a coach who did not connect with enough of his players, brought a system that did not translate and never adapted to recruiting in the SEC. “He did not embrace Louisiana, and he didn’t embrace LSU culture,” one former staff member said. “He felt like it needed to be changed, and part of it needed to be changed, but you have to come in and really embrace it.” Unable to harness LSU Inside the football operations building, Kelly kept a glass-topped box full of rings from championships and bowl games in his office. It commemorated the highlights from what had been a long and successful career, and it was a reminder of what he still needed to accomplish when he came to LSU. At Notre Dame, Kelly revived a proud program that had declined for years. Notre Dame reached the 2012 national championship game in his third season, and he finished with five consecutive 10-win seasons that included two playoff appearances. Kelly came to LSU with a 263-95-2 record. He thought he could blend his methods with LSU’s natural advantages. “We were not at the same point in terms of what I needed and what I felt like the program needed,” Kelly told The Advocate in the spring of 2022. “Notre Dame, I think, wanted to do it. They're like a big ship that is turning, and it takes a long time to turn that ship. I needed to turn a little faster than they did.” At the time, Woodward had watched LSU win the 2019 national championship, only to go 11-12 over the next two years under coach Ed Orgeron. Woodward thought the program had become too turbulent, and he fired Orgeron in the middle of the 2021 season. Woodward wanted a stable hand. He believed Kelly could provide it. Given the ability to clean house, Kelly did. He got rid of several longtime assistants, starting with strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt. The cold way Moffitt was dismissed upset many people close to the team, especially former players. "I certainly felt like there were times that we were battling things that were just established," said former LSU special teams and recruiting coordinator Brian Polian, Kelly's right-hand man his first season. One former staff member called the situation Kelly inherited "an absolute dumpster fire," and multiple people credited him for fixing some things as he emphasized academics and accountability. Kelly's methods were "a shock to the system," a former staff member said. Some thought they were never fully accepted. “BK tried to build LSU in the mold of Notre Dame, and that's not what LSU needed,” the former member of the athletic department said. “LSU needed structure, but it didn't need to swing so far away from its identity that it forgot who it was. “And so I think he brought in structure, but there was a disconnect between the LSU identity and the identity of the head coach and the football program.” 'I didn’t see him' Throughout his career, Kelly has taken a CEO-style approach to being a head coach. He wanted to implement his process, lean on quality assistants and run the organization from above. Multiple staff members respected his intelligence, and they appreciated that he empowered them to do their jobs instead of micromanaging them. "He would be totally hands off and let them go do that," a former staff member said. "I think that was a good way, at times, to handle that, but I think that let things go off the rails in certain scenarios with him not necessarily hands on." His approach worked in the past. After going 4-8 in 2016, Kelly led Notre Dame to five straight double-digit win seasons. The run coincided with a string of successful defensive coordinator hires in now-Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko, now-Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea and now-Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman. At LSU, Kelly never put together the right combination of assistants. Polian was fired after the first season. The entire defensive staff was fired after the 2023 season, when quarterback Jayden Daniels won the Heisman Trophy but LSU had one of the worst defenses in school history. LSU overhauled the staff at the time, a process Woodward was heavily involved in. It brought back former linebackers coach Blake Baker as the defensive coordinator, longtime cornerbacks coach Corey Raymond and general manager Austin Thomas, all of whom were let go when Kelly first got to LSU. Multiple people added three of Kelly’s trusted assistants when he first started at LSU — Polian, chief of staff Beth Rex and mental performance coach Amber Selking — often rubbed people the wrong way. Rex left the program in the middle of the 2024 season, while Selking has continued to work with the team. Kelly's detached style affected other areas. One current staff member joked it felt like "Where's Waldo?" LSU had full staff meetings 48 hours before games, but otherwise, a former staff member said he could count on two hands how many full staff meetings took place in his three-plus years with the team. At his previous school, the head coach held a staff meeting every morning. "He would interact with you when he needed something," the current staff member said. "He was great to deal with when you interacted with him. Cordial. Friendly. Great sense of humor. But it wasn’t often. I think people would have liked to see him more." Said another current staff member: "My first four weeks here, I didn’t see him." Many players on the team did not have a strong relationship with Kelly, multiple people said. It annoyed some of them when he messed up their names. One of the current staff members said Kelly tried to connect, but "he didn't try hard enough." While a former player called his relationship with Kelly "close," he acknowledged that may have been because he was a captain. After the 2023 season, LSU wanted to keep him defensive tackle Maason Smith. As Smith debated whether or not to enter the NFL draft, a donor involved in the operation of LSU’s name, image and likeness collective participated in a meeting. He suggested Kelly should call Smith, thinking that could reassure him without a new defensive line coach in place. Smith eventually turned pro. "'That’s a great idea. If you have his phone number, please share it with me,'" the donor recalled Kelly saying. He then thought: "It seems odd that I have his phone number and you don’t." A former staff member said that in the NIL era, establishing relationships with players has become even more important for the head coach. Some players who weren't close to Kelly thought the only time he talked to them was when he yelled after they made a mistake, one of the current staff members said. “If you love them up, they’re OK with being screamed at and yelled at because they know you really care,” a former staff member said. “I feel like that was a blindspot, for sure.” One parent of an LSU player did not meet Kelly for almost a year after he got the job. He spoke to him for the second time ever this summer, even though his son has been on the team the entire time. “It was just strange,” the parent said. “People would ask me, ‘What kind of guy is he?’ We didn’t know.” Missteps in recruiting Early in Kelly's tenure, one former staff member remembered looking at LSU’s recruiting boards. “We had people up there from Providence, Rhode Island, and all kinds of places,” the staff member said. “I thought, ‘Hmmm.’” Louisiana’s homegrown talent is seen as a built-in advantage to the job, but LSU signed only 10 high school players from the state in Kelly's first full recruiting cycle. Three years later, only eight of the 25 high school signees in the 2023 class are at LSU. That approach changed once running backs coach and associate head coach Frank Wilson took over recruiting after Polian got fired, but the first class left a hole on a roster that Kelly wanted built through the high school ranks. One of the current staffers said Kelly did not understand the importance of recruiting the state and lacked important relationships with local high school coaches. Polian pushed back at the notion Louisiana natives always want to stay, adding "if the money was significantly different, they were leaving." LSU fell behind on NIL spending, athletic officials acknowledged in the past, until a fundraising push took place going into this season. In recruiting, Kelly viewed himself as the closer. He was involved, but multiple staff members said he was not obsessed with it, preferring to delegate responsibilities until he was needed. “At first, from a recruiting perspective, it was tough to get him to do a lot of things because he didn't have to up at Notre Dame,” a former staff member said. “I wouldn’t say he was necessarily stuck in his ways, but he wasn’t fully willing to adapt at times.” The recruiting staff was given a certain number of phone calls per week that Kelly would have with prospects. One former staff member who has worked at other SEC schools said the calls had to be arranged for Kelly, whereas coaches he had worked for in the past initiated them on their own. Multiple staff members said recruits and their high school coaches questioned why they didn't hear from Kelly. It made them doubt that LSU really wanted them. One former staff member called that the "biggest complaint" the staff got and added there were times when Kelly didn't know he had already met someone. "I think that hurt in recruiting a lot because he would say, ‘Hey, nice to meet you,'" the former staff member said. "And he had met the kid before. That was tough." LSU still signed three straight top 10 classes, according to 247Sports, but it needed to add experienced transfers going into Kelly’s fourth season, especially on defense. It assembled the No. 1 transfer class in the country, according to 247Sports, after convincing donors to back an NIL front-loading effort. The roster cost about $18 million, Kelly said, a number that sources said was more than triple what the team spent the year before. The investment raised expectations. “What blows my mind about this is that the more money that we spent on the roster — and I think by all accounts, the better the talent got — the worse the results were,” said the donor involved in LSU’s collective. “And I do not understand that.” A season off the rails Before spring practice started, Kelly expressed confidence in his team, saying LSU could win the SEC championship now that it had improved the roster. But many of the same issues continued from last season, primarily on offense. Although an improved defense helped LSU start 4-0, the Tigers fell out of contention. They have the worst rushing offense in the SEC for the second straight year, and quarterback Garrett Nussmeier has been inconsistent behind a shaky offensive line. LSU fired Sloan the day after Kelly. “The message with BK was always about the process and our details need to be better,” a current staff member said. “It can kind of just go in one ear and out the other. We’d talk about details and process so much. I have no idea what our process was, and I have no idea if we know what details are.” Staff members could feel things slipping over the past month. One said LSU had no "juice on our sideline" in a 24-19 loss to Ole Miss on Sept. 27. Kelly continued to emphasize attention to detail and maintaining their process, another staff member said, through the week of the Texas A&M game. But they thought the energy was off. "He was like the Tasmanian devil on the sideline for A&M," a current staff member said. "And then after the game in the locker room, he didn't yell at anybody. He was just like, ‘We've got to give those players answers because we failed them, and we've got to give them answers.’ It was completely different." On Sunday morning, LSU's staff went back to work. One person said "it felt like NFL cut day." Some broke down game film. Others hosted recruits. As the day continued, they could tell something more than the firing of the offensive coordinator could happen, especially when Kelly left the building after the meeting with Woodward and other officials. They knew for sure Kelly was losing his job when they were told to come to an 8 p.m. team meeting. With four games left, LSU has to conduct another coaching search while finishing the season under interim coach Frank Wilson. Interim athletic director Verge Ausberry has been given “full authority” to make the next hire, two members of the LSU Board of Supervisors said Friday. Asked what qualities the next coach needs to succeed, a longtime LSU staff member said the person must accept a culture in which every person in the area cares about the team. The coach will need to be passionate and tough, the staff member said, because that resonates with the fan base and is necessary to compete in the SEC. “I think the message was always right," the staff member said about Kelly. "I really do. I think the thought process behind what we were doing was right in a lot of aspects. There’s just a certain edge that this place has, and that’s what ultimately slipped from us."
