Monday Down South: Brian Kelly’s sudden ending at LSU was years in the making

Takeaways, trends and technicalities from Week 9 in the SEC.

Kelly goes belly up

Well, that escalated quickly.

Before we get into the grim details of Brian Kelly‘s final hours at LSU, let’s zoom out a little. Not far, just a few weeks. Think back: On Sept. 26, Kelly’s Tigers were 4-0, ranked No. 4 in both major polls, and basking in the momentum of big early-season wins over Clemson and Florida. The defense, the Achilles’ heel of his first 3 seasons, had finally turned a corner. Whatever speculation there was about Kelly’s future was concerned with whether this was the team that would get him over the hump. At that point — again, barely 30 days ago — he was 33-11 as LSU’s head coach, an identical winning percentage to Nick Saban’s in his sanctified run in Baton Rouge from 2000-04.

Exactly one month later, Kelly was toast, kaput, a solitary figure exiting the premises for the last time as the latest obscenely-compensated casualty in what is shaping up as the most merciless (and most expensive, by far) coaching carousel on record. Folks, the calendar has not even turned to November. Already, Kelly is the 11th FBS head coach to walk the plank since the start of the regular season, the 3rd from an SEC school, and the second whose team was ranked in the top 10 as recently as the last full moon. Like James Franklin at Penn State, the collapse on the field unleashed such a cascade of disappointment and negativity at the end that no appeal to Kelly’s track record or monumental buyout could withstand.

Unlike Franklin, who survived 11-plus years in State College and came within a hair’s breadth of the CFP Championship Game in the same calendar year he was canned, Kelly’s tenure at LSU is going to be remembered as cursed from the start. An awkward fit, a culture shock, a cynical experiment — however you want to describe it, it never quite felt right, even before the bottom fell out. Part of the shock of his arrival from Notre Dame in December 2021, beyond the sheer audacity of hiring away the longest-tenured coach in South Bend since Knute Rockne himself, was the idea of this guy assuming the role of cultural lodestar in the state of Louisiana. A Massachusetts native who’d spent his entire career in the Midwest, Kelly introduced himself by feigning a Southern accent and never really recovered.

That’s how it’s going in the books, anyway. Kelly showed up talking about winning national championships but never won anything beyond the SEC West in his first season. His teams cracked the AP top 10 all 4 years, but never came all that close to finishing there. Prior to this season, they were 0-3 in season-openers, putting their Playoff chances on life support right out of the gate; when they finally ended the streak earlier this year, it was at the expense of a Clemson outfit that subsequently crashed and burned in its own right. The defense was such an albatross in 2023 that a historic offense led by Heisman-winning, future franchise quarterback Jayden Daniels was relegated to the ReliaQuest Bowl. A promising campaign in ’24 unraveled in a 3-game losing streak in October and November, in the midst of which the nation’s No. 1 recruit flipped his commitment to another school. The current team, on the heels of LSU’s first 4-0 start since the 2019 national championship team, is in the throes of an identical implosion.

Still, the notion that there was anything inevitable about Saturday night’s 49-25 debacle against Texas A&M is a lot easier to make after the fact than it was before Saturday night. The loss was LSU’s 3rd in its past 4 games, but the previous 2 were competitive, 1-score decisions against ranked opponents (Ole Miss and Vanderbilt), both on the road. In between, the Tigers had handled South Carolina in routine fashion. The locals were not happy, but had not completely abandoned hope. A&M, which was more efficient that dominant en route to a 7-0 start, arrived in Baton Rouge as a mere 2.5-point favorite, in part due to several key LSU injuries. The Tigers led at halftime, 18-14.

The 2nd-half collapse was so thorough that, by the end, hardly anyone who’d witnessed could remember that it had ever been close. The Aggies dominated in all phases, ripping off 35 consecutive points before allowing LSU to tack on a meaningless touchdown in garbage time, not nearly enough to make the final score appear like anything but what it was: A humiliation. Looking outmanned and listless, the Tigers wilted on both sides of the line of scrimmage, allowing A&M’s offense to run at will and its defense to hound QB Garrett Nussmeier into an early exit. The home crowd, disgusted, streamed for the exits in the 4th quarter amid chants of “Fire Kelly,” while boosters in the luxury seats reportedly passed the hat to do just that.

There’s something uniquely clarifying about trudging to the end of a blowout defeat in front of 85,000 emphatically empty seats. It wasn’t the first time LSU fans had abandoned the premises in the midst of a lopsided loss on Kelly’s watch, or for that matter the first time they’d watched a Kelly team get run off the field by Texas A&M in decisive fashion in the second half. They seemed to collectively decide in real time that it would be the last.

If Kelly’s boss, athletic director Scott Woodward, wasn’t convinced by the dismal scene on Saturday night, he was on Sunday afternoon, when he reportedly summoned his head coach for a meeting where “things got very tense,” according to The Athletic. Kelly balked at Woodward’s insistence that he fire offensive coordinator Joe Sloan, per the report, at which point “the situation then escalated, with the head coach pushing back hard against his boss.” A hastily drafted statement made the divorce official.

LSU will play out the string under an interim coach, Frank Wilson, who has 2 stints as a full-time head coach at UT-San Antonio and McNeese State. His first game on the job will be a Week 11 trip to Alabama on the other side of an open date for both teams.

Thus ends the Kelly era in fairly shocking and undeniably ugly fashion, none of its promises fulfilled. Was the project doomed? It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure up a timeline where Jayden Daniels gets the bare minimum of support from the defense he needs to sustain a Playoff run in 2023, or where Daniels doesn’t get knocked out of the game in a shootout loss to Alabama, or where a healthy Harold Perkins Jr. settles on a position and delivers on the massive potential he flashed as a freshman. After beating Bama to claim the division title in 2022, the ’23 team was Kelly’s great missed opportunity — if not to win an elusive championship, then at least to sustain the initial momentum in Year 2 and establish a blueprint for what the finished product might look like.

Then again, it takes just as much imagination to project delusions of grandeur onto teams that plainly stagnated the past 2 seasons as the pressure on Kelly mounted. There was a point this season, just after the cathartic opening-day win at Clemson, when it was possible to believe LSU had turned a corner, or was just about to, which in the end might turn out to be Kelly’s real talent. At Notre Dame, he engineered a long, mostly successful tenure largely by sustaining that sense of anticipation for the better part of a decade without ever getting as close to the promised land as his record implied. (His successor, of course, has already gotten closer than Kelly ever did at a much younger age.) In the SEC, he never really made it look convincing for more than a few weeks at a time, and in the end couldn’t even manage that. Nobody objected much back when Kelly said the move was motivated by his determination to go to a program where he could win it all, which it had become painfully clear was not going to happen in South Bend. LSU’s mistake was betting big that that said more about Notre Dame than it did about the guy who was always just one step away.

QB pains on The Plains

Is Jackson Arnold finished as Auburn’s starting quarterback? Arnold was benched Saturday after serving up a ghastly pick-6 in the Tigers’ trip to Arkansas, one that turned a red-zone scoring opportunity into a 21-10 deficit at the end of the first half.

Arnold has not been especially pick-prone; that was just his 2nd INT of the year on 207 attempts. Ironically, though, it might have been the best thing to happen to Auburn’s offense yet this season — not necessarily because veteran backup Ashton Daniels represented a significant improvement over Arnold, but because he wasn’t asked to be. Instead, with Arnold on ice for the entire second half, Hugh Freeze finally heeded season-long pleas to run the dang ball, resulting in the Tigers’ best output on the ground since the season opener at Baylor: 243 yards on 47 carries (excluding sacks), yielding a 15-minute advantage in time of possession in a 33-24 win that might have at least temporarily saved Freeze’s job. The vast majority of that number came courtesy of RB Jeremiah Cobb, who ground out a career-high 153 yards on 5.5 per carry and helped Auburn score on all 5 2nd-half possessions.

Now, for the caveats. One, all 5 scores came on field goals after the offense stalled out in the red zone. Two, the defense had as much to do with setting up those kicks as the offense after forcing 4 consecutive turnovers on Arkansas’ last 4 offensive possessions, including a go-ahead pick-6 of their own that swung the game permanently for the Tigers. And No. 3, results against Arkansas’ rock-bottom defense aren’t necessarily predictive against the rest of the conference.

All that said, at least it’s something, which for a unit that was badly in need of an identity certainly beats whatever they were trying to accomplish over the course of an 0-4 start in conference play.

Freeze was noncommittal about Arnold’s status going forward, telling reporters after the game he’ll have to evaluate the film before he makes any decisions. He has more to consider than just the Tigers’ upcoming games against Kentucky and Vanderbilt, namely what gives them the best chance to beat Alabama in the Iron Bowl. One of the reasons Auburn pursued Arnold in the first place was his performance (mainly as a runner, for the record) in Oklahoma’s 24-3 upset over Bama last November. That game was by far his best after returning to the lineup from a midseason benching at OU. Time will tell if he’s due for another comeback. Meanwhile, Freeze owes to his team and himself to stick with what’s working until it doesn’t.

CFP Realpolitik

It’s that time of year, when the fog begins to lift and the outlines of the postseason picture begin to come into view. Each week down the home stretch, CFP Realpolitik will size up the Playoff pecking order from a strictly practical perspective.

There is a lot of football left before the field is set on Dec. 7, and a lot of teams still clinging to at least some token shreds of hope. Roughly a third of the FBS ranks still has a chance to make the cut, according to ESPN’s Football Power Index, even if that chance is so infinitesimally low it has to be rounded up to one percent. Seven SEC teams have odds to make the Playoff at +450 or shorter, via ESPN Bet. Of the 45 teams with a non-zero shot, though, only 9 have odds above 50%, and the drop-off below that bar is steep.

Plenty to quibble with there — the FPI algorithm appears to be hallucinating a very different version of Texas than the one that’s actually taken the field this season — but as a rough outline of where things stand with 6 Saturdays to go, it’ll do. Without overreacting to potential Playoff bids, a few early conclusions:

Brace for chalk. All those teams in green in the Big Ten and SEC? One of the reasons their outlook is so airtight is the fact that there’s not a single head-to-head meeting between them until their respective conference championship games, which by that point will matter only for seeding. All 7 control their own Playoff fate, and probably enjoy some margin for error, too. FPI gives each of them at least a 70% chance of making the field, which frankly seems cautious considering their remaining schedules. Barring a dramatic turn of events, you may as well go ahead and pencil all seven into the bracket until further notice.

Of course, dramatic turns of events in November in this stupid, chaotic sport are the rule, not the exception, and thank goodness for that. For now, though, what those odds mean for the rest of the board is that 5 of the 7 available at-large tickets are already effectively reserved. The pecking order for the remaining 2 is … uh, complicated. (I am on a deadline here.) For now, I’ll just say this: Vanderbilt is in the driver’s seat coming off back-to-back ranked wins over LSU and Missouri. Not only do the Commodores control their Playoff fate, unlike any almost other team outside of the Green Zone right now, they could conceivably survive a November loss and still have a compelling case to make the cut at 10-2. Everyone else on the bubble is resigned to running the table or wining their conference, which for most of them amounts to the same thing.

On that note, Week 10 is a big one for all of the SEC bubble teams: Texas and Missouri face must-win dates against Vandy and Texas A&M, respectively, with the Longhorns and Tigers both potentially without their starting quarterbacks; and Oklahoma’s trip to Tennessee is a de facto elimination match. Looking ahead, there is a scenario in which the ‘Dores go to Knoxville in the season finale with a golden ticket on the line in the first nationally relevant Tennessee-Vanderbilt game in living memory. But both teams face significant hurdles in the meantime.

The Big 12 is buck wild (again). Last year, the Big 12 race ended in a 4-way tie for first place that required a gordian tiebreaker process to settle which 2 would play for the title. This year’s standings are headed for another knot. As it stands, exactly half the league (the 8 teams listed in the chart) boasts a winning record in conference play; between them, those ei8 ht teams will play head-to-head 8 times in November, all but guaranteeing a mutual bloodbath.

The upshot is that it all but guarantees the Big 12 is doomed again to be a 1-bid league. The most realistic scenario for a 2nd bid is something along the lines of the last remaining undefeated team, BYU, running the table to finish 12-0, then losing the Big 12 Championship Game and settling for an at-large ticket while the champ takes the auto bid. Otherwise, you’ve got to get pretty deep in the weeds to work out another path. And considering that pulling it off would require the Cougars to dispatch fellow contenders Texas Tech (in Lubbock), TCU and Cincinnati (in Cincy) in consecutive weeks, that one is pretty farfetched at this point, too. For now, the situation is strictly championship-or-bust.

Notre Dame needs help. The Irish have a direct route to a 10-2 finish, and both of those blemishes — narrow losses to Miami and Texas A&M in the first 2 games — are about as forgivable as they come. Still, even if they do run the table, it will be at the expense of a relatively lukewarm schedule, which will likely leave them queuing up behind any 10-2 team from the SEC, and potentially the loser of the ACC Championship Game, as well. (Especially if the latter is Miami.) Notre Dame has its own business to take care of, but in the meantime it should be rooting for an outbreak of chaos in both conferences to clear the traffic.

Dark-horse of the Week: Houston. The Cougars went on the road Saturday to knock off the defending Big 12 champ, Arizona State, putting themselves in position to pull off exactly the kind of sneaky strong finish that punched the Sun Devils’ Playoff ticket last year. At 4-1 in Big 12 play (7-1 overall), they’ve already surpassed their conference win total in either of their first 2 season in the league. They also have the benefit of the most manageable November schedule of any of the remaining contenders. Houston will likely be favored in 3 of the last 4, with the lone exception, a toss-up against TCU, coming at home. In a wide-open race, why not the Cougs?

Dude of the Week: Ole Miss edge Princewill Umanmielen

Ole Miss’ pass rush has dropped off significantly following the wholesale departure of last year’s NFL-ready front, including Umanmielen’s older brother Princely, a 3rd-round pick. But Saturday’s 36-24 win at Oklahoma looked like a revival. Princely was beastly against the Sooners, generating 7 QB pressures with a pair of sacks, per PFF, as well as playing his part in tracking down an OU back in the end zone for a safety. On Oklahoma’s next possession following the safety, he snuffed out another drive by corralling the not-easily-corralled John Mateer on 4th down.

Throw in a holding penalty (offsetting) and a game-clinching pressure on OU’s final drive, for good measure. The Rebels could have used a little more of that in their Week 8 loss at Georgia, but if it’s a sign of things to come, it will be worth the wait.

Notebook

1.) Occasionally when a defender makes a play in the backfield you’ll hear the expression, “he could have taken the handoff.” But at one point Saturday, Vanderbilt DB CJ Heard literally took the handoff, knifing into the backfield to disrupt the mesh point on a zone read before backup Mizzou QB Matt Zollers could complete the handoff to RB Jamal Roberts.

Zollers, a true freshman, was solid in relief of injured starter Beau Pribula in a difficult situation on the road after Pribula left the game with an apparent leg injury, but this was potentially season-altering giveaway. Gifted good field position at the Mizzou 44, Vanderbilt’s offense capitalized with a go-ahead touchdown drive that supplied the final margin in a 17-10 win that significantly boosted Vandy’s national title odds while likely cratering Missouri’s.

2.) Texas A&M has no apparent weaknesses right now, but the Aggies’ biggest strength remains getting off the field on 3rd down. LSU converted just 2-for-13 attempts on Saturday night, which is par for the course: In 5 SEC games, opposing offense are just 8-for-55 on 3rd down, a downright bleak 14.6% — best in the nation in conference play.

3.) Ole Miss might want to consider retiring the Austin Simmons package in short-yardage. Understandably, the Rebels want to keep their once and presumably future starting QB involved after ceding the job to Trinidad Chambliss due to injury, but every time Simmons came on the field in Saturday’s win at Oklahoma it was a momentum killer. In the first half, he came on to throw a pair of incomplete passes in a goal-to-go situation, including missing an open tight end on a jump pass into the end zone, forcing Ole Miss to settle for a field goal; in the second half, the Rebels broke out the package again for a 4th-and-1 attempt from their own 24-yard line that ended in disaster when a direct snap to RB Kewan Lacy went awry, resulting a big loss and a short field for the OU offense. Simmons’ 3rd appearance came on a two-point conversion in the 4th quarter, another incomplete pass. There is increasingly less incentive to take the ball out of Chambliss’ hands for any reason.

4.) Oklahoma QB John Mateer is ice-cold throwing downfield since returning from an injury to his throwing hand. Mateer was just 1-for-9 on attempts of 20+ air yards against Ole Miss, which was actually a slight improvement after going 0-for-5 over the previous 2 games since his return. Prior to the injury, he was a very respectable 10-for-19 on downfield attempts with 2 touchdowns and no picks.

5.) We’re running much too long here for a full accounting of Texas’ come-from-behind, overtime win at Mississippi State — the Longhorns’ 2nd OT escape in as many weeks, coming on the heels of a Week 8 nail-biter at Kentucky — but suffice to say that it is well past time that opposing punters stopped punting the ball to Ryan Niblett.

Where would Texas be without this guy? In the span of 3 weeks, he’s returned 2 punts for touchdowns against MSU and Oklahoma and singlehandedly salvaged an anemic offensive outing in Lexington with a pair of long returns that set up 2 of the Longhorns’ 3 scoring “drives” in regulation. Seriously, if you’re my punter and you allow this guy touch the ball, I’m revoking your scholarship.

6.) Last week, I singled out Auburn kicker Austin McPherson for “Dud of the Week” after he missed 3 field goals in an excruciating overtime loss to Missouri. This week, credit where credit is due: McPherson tied a school record by hitting all 6 of his field-goal attempts in the Tigers’ come-from-behind win at Arkansas. The not-so-good news: 5 of those attempts came in the red zone, where Auburn failed to score a touchdown on 6 trips.

Matt Hinton

Matt Hinton, author of 'Monday Down South' and our resident QB guru, has previously written for Dr. Saturday, CBS and Grantland.