How it all caught up to Brian Kelly and LSU
Exclusive details on the Kelly era in Baton Rouge, and how it all came crashing down these past two weeks
Step inside the political beast that is LSU football, and one axiom above all else holds forever true:
Down here, they say, you won’t see the bullet that takes you out till it hits you square in the eye.
Across the past 23 seasons, the Tigers have won three national championships under three different head coaches. They have also now fired three different head coaches, including two of the three who captured those titles.
Brian Kelly never came close to reaching the heights of his predecessors in Baton Rouge, which is one of the many reasons why he was fired on Sunday night.
His political instincts sharp, Kelly undoubtedly saw what was coming his way once the governor got involved in the current mess that is LSU football.
There is some truth in the governor deciding his fate, but it’s not the whole truth. Not when the athletic director who ultimately fired Kelly, Scott Woodward, is himself a political animal; and certainly not when the university stretches into its fifth month without a full-time president, since William F. Tate IV left for Rutgers in May.
As if there were any doubt of a power void down on the Bayou, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry took to the podium at a news conference Wednesday and, among many rants about college coaching salaries, agents and the like, said:
“I can tell you right now, Scott Woodward is not selecting the next coach. Hell, I’ll let Donald Trump select it before I let him do it.”
But before figuring out who will lead LSU’s coaching search — the school says it will be interim AD Verge Ausberry, a longtime athletic department administrator — one must ask the question of who was in charge of LSU football to begin with. Getting to the bottom of that helps explain how Kelly got hired, how Kelly came to genuinely love the job and how his four-year tenure with the Tigers fell apart across two underwhelming weeks.
Through 297 career victories, Kelly was, above all else, known for two things:
He was a winner.
And he was a guy who figured out how to succeed in this business without losing his mind.
Viral sideline outbursts notwithstanding, Kelly is considered even-keeled among his peers. He took advantage of all of the off-field opportunities afforded to a big-time college football coach, and he rarely suffered for it.
If it wasn’t a European vacation, it was idle time at a lake house in Michigan.
Kelly is, in the words of one of his coaching peers, “a phenomenal golfer.”
This, it should be noted, is often considered a back-handed compliment among coaches.