At LSU, urgency levels for a fast start are high. Brian Kelly isn’t shying away from it

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ATLANTA — The paw prints are everywhere. The LSU players see them as they go into their building. They see them on hallway video monitors. They enter the weight room and there they are: on weights, bags, all kinds of equipment.

Those Clemson paw prints.

But it’s not really about Clemson, which happens to be LSU’s opening opponent this year. The paw prints stand for something else for this LSU program.

“At LSU, the expectation is to win a national championship, and I think we were too focused on having the type of season to do that,” quarterback Garrett Nussmeier said. “I think we lost focus on where it starts.”

LSU has not won a national championship since 2019, which, incredibly, is also the last time it won its season opener:

• 2020: A home loss to Mississippi State, 44-34.
• 2021: A loss at UCLA, 38-27, in what proved to be Ed Orgeron’s last season as LSU coach.
• 2022: A 24-23 loss to Florida State in New Orleans in Brian Kelly’s debut, when LSU seemed to tie the score as time expired, only to miss the extra point.
• 2023: Another loss to Florida State, this time in Orlando, 45-24.
• 2024: A 27-20 loss to USC in Las Vegas, with the Trojans scoring the winning touchdown with eight seconds left.

After the game, Kelly pounded the table in frustration at his news conference. Two of the five season-opening losses were not his own, but the narrative had become his to own.

“Look, I’ve been doing it for, for three decades, right?” Kelly said. “And I needed to look at, critically, what we were doing relative to our preparation for the first game.”

The opener wasn’t a major problem for Kelly before LSU. He began his final season as Notre Dame’s coach by winning the 2021 opener — at Florida State, of all teams.

But then Kelly came to LSU with a massive 10-year, $95 million contract and massive expectations — namely, to win the national title that had eluded him. He has done fine, going 10-4, 10-3 and 9-4, but the opening-game problems have become a symbol of the Tigers falling short. They put the team in an immediate hole, deflate the fan base and push the team off the national radar. Last year, the Tigers responded to the USC loss by winning the next six but then lost their next three and were out of the College Football Playoff conversation.

Some coaches would ignore the opening-game narrative. Kelly opted to embrace it.

“We’ve made it a specific goal,” Kelly said Monday during SEC media days. “I think it was important to have a tangible, specific goal for us to start the season. And I think it’s important our kids want that. They can taste it. I use the analogy that, you know, when I work out, I like to have a clock in front of me so I know what the time is and when it’s time to, to finish or to finish strong. And that’s what this is. This is a clock in front of them saying, ‘This is where we start this.’”

Then, Kelly added, it becomes the same approach for the second game, then the third game and so on. Of course, that will be the test of Kelly’s strategy.

Clemson could be a preseason top-five team. It’s tough to win in Clemson, which has the other Death Valley. In a normal season, losing there could be forgiven. Rather than acknowledge that, Kelly is going the other way, putting pressure on that one outcome.

So, could this backfire, players were asked?

“I don’t think so,” Nussmeier said. “Because it’s very stressed into if it doesn’t go the way we want it to go, then we’re back to going 1-0 again. It’s not about the result. It’s about the process.”

Linebacker Whit Weeks said it was more about motivation.

“Let’s go out there and let’s change the narrative around LSU. Let’s go get a win,” Weeks said. “So it places a lot more emphasis on it this offseason than we have in past years.”

This, to be clear, is not the only change Kelly made heading into his fourth season, which sets up as an important one. Especially when his successor at Notre Dame, Marcus Freeman, took his former program to last year’s national championship game.

In the transfer portal, LSU brought in 17 players this offseason, though not with as much fanfare as Texas Tech did this year or Ole Miss did last year. The Tigers did it strategically, with Kelly pointing specifically to offensive lineman Josh Thompson (via Northwestern) to play right tackle or right guard, and Barion Brown (Kentucky’s second-leading receiver last year) to complement the receiver unit.

“It’s the deepest roster we have because it incorporates some of the young guys that we took some lumps with along the way,” Kelly said. “So it’s a nice balance of veteran players, young guys that have grown in the program and some transfers that have played a lot of football.”

The defense will be the big focus, given the struggles on that side under Kelly. There was only incremental progress last year under defensive coordinator Blake Baker, going from the second worst in scoring defense in the SEC in 2023 to the third worst last year. The hope is for more progress in Baker’s second year, with some help from the portal and some from experience and a big boost from a key player’s position change.

Harold Perkins Jr., the top recruit in LSU’s class three years ago, was moved around his first two years, and mostly out of a pass-rushing role in 2023. Then he tore his ACL early last season. This spring, LSU opted to move Perkins to the star position, where he can play in space, whether that’s pass rush or just attacking the ball wherever it goes.

“I think that’s the best position that you can put Harold Perkins in because at that position you can be a freak-of-nature athlete,” Weeks said.

There’s still no shortage of talent at LSU. Whether it’s back to the same elite level as Texas, Georgia and Alabama is debatable. Whether the right staff is in place, starting with Kelly, also remains a question.

What is clear is that the urgency level has gone up in Baton Rouge. Starting with that opener.

“We know we’re going into a tough environment to play, and I can’t be more excited to be doing that,” Weeks said. “You know you want it. You come to LSU to play the best, and Clemson is one of the best teams in the country. So why wouldn’t you want to go play them?”

(Photo: Candice Ward / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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