Brian Kelly fired: Why he never fit at LSU and what led to his downfall

When Brian Kelly arrived Sunday morning, intent on making staff changes to try to fix an LSU season quickly going off the rails, he could not get into LSU’s football facility. 

His thumbprint to get into the LSU Football Operations Center didn’t work, sources told CBS Sports. It took a couple minutes and some help before Kelly finally got in and was able to get up to his office, where the trouble continued. 

When it was shared Sunday morning, the fingerprint snafu felt like a funny anecdote just hours after a disastrous 64th birthday for Kelly, whose LSU Tigers had been crushed at home, 49-25, by No. 3 Texas A&M. It was reminiscent of the famous clip of former LSU Tiger Jamal Adams being unable to get into the New York Jets’ football building and immediately thinking he might have gotten cut. But for all its humor, that moment did capture something real about Kelly’s LSU tenure: From the day he arrived, he never seemed to fully belong. 

By Sunday night, Kelly again needed help getting buzzed into the football facility. This time there was intent behind it. He had already been informed of his firing after four seasons as LSU’s head coach. 

A hire once celebrated as a home run for LSU AD Scott Woodward now ends in the second-largest buyout in college football history ($53.8 million), though negotiations are ongoing to lower that total number. 

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Why didn’t it work for Kelly at LSU?

You’ll hear the word fit — or lack thereof — thrown around a lot in hindsight of LSU’s decision to fire Kelly. From the early weird pronunciation of “family” mishap to calling out LSU fans for being spoiled, Kelly never seemed to understand how to authentically connect with the LSU fanbase. It always felt like a politician trying too hard to be something he wasn’t. LSU is one of the best jobs in college football because of how much the state of Louisiana adores their Tigers. There’s no other Power Four team in the state to divide attention and loyalty the way there is in neighboring states Alabama and Mississippi. There’s a reason why the three coaches who preceded Kelly all won national championships in Baton Rouge. When everyone is pulling in the same direction, that’s what’s possible at LSU.

But there’s a laundry list of reasons Kelly never seemed to be the right guy for LSU despite his strong coaching credentials, which included a title game appearance while at Notre Dame. 

• He quickly fired beloved strength and conditioning coach Tommy Moffitt, a man all three of those title-winning coaches completely trusted to make LSU into a tough, physical team. You saw that Saturday night when Moffitt, now at Texas A&M, was on the sideline of the tougher, better team. 
• Getting rid of defensive assistants Blake Baker and Corey Raymond, only to panic after Year 1 and bring them both back at significantly higher salaries, led to questions about Kelly’s overall plan. 
• He was hesitant to embrace NIL and two offseason ago whined about not wanting to spend up to land top players as his rivals happily did and were successful doing so. 

But what mattered most of all was that Kelly is significantly different than the three men who preceded him — Nick Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron — in one important area: He is not obsessed with recruiting. 

Kelly took more of a CEO approach and delegated a lot of those responsibilities to assistant coaches and staffers. It worked for him at Notre Dame and the results in the Bayou weren’t bad on paper — he was still signing top 10 classes at LSU — but there were grumbles that Kelly didn’t seem to care so much about the lifeblood to winning in the SEC. There were questions about whether he was prioritizing the right kind of recruits. It wasn’t until after LSU hired Austin Thomas away from Ole Miss as senior associate AD for football administration that there seemed to be a shift in the right direction. 

“What they’ve done from a high school standpoint, what they’ve done from a hiring standpoint, what they’ve done from a portal standpoint, it’s been up to the standard that every LSU fan would expect,” an industry source told CBS Sports before the season started. “And in the three years before that with Brian Kelly, it was not.” 

For as much attention as Hugh Freeze has gotten for his love of golf, insiders believe Kelly was on the golf course even more. Repeatedly over his time in Baton Rouge, sources questioned his time commitment and the frequency in which Kelly was out of the office. “The players see he’s not bought in,” one source told CBS Sports last year. 

When everything is going well, those things don’t matter. Winning cures everything, after all. But it’s those little things that can stick in people’s minds when expectations aren’t met. Kelly was fired Sunday, but he had been building the case for his own dismissal for years.

His public comments over the years did nothing to tamp down expectations he ultimately couldn’t come close to meeting. 

After beating Oklahoma to finish the 2024 regular season 8-4, Kelly said “We’re taking receipts … and we’ll see you at the national championship.” 

He said at SEC spring meetings in May, “This is the best roster we’ve put together.” 

And yet it didn’t take long to realize LSU had major holes on the roster, especially on the offensive line, that would prove problematic for the Tigers’ preseason playoff hopes. When Kelly had a Heisman Trophy winner at quarterback (Jayden Daniels), the defense was disastrous and held the Tigers back. LSU finally invested in defense the last portal cycle and that largely paid off — while the offense slipped to its worst marks since the 2000s. 

There was success along the way, including a win over Alabama and SEC Championship appearance his first season in 2022, followed by Daniels’ Heisman season in 2023, but Kelly was always, quite fairly, held to the expectation of competing for national championships. 

No matter what Kelly did, he couldn’t seem to press the right buttons. And all along the way, that supreme confidence of his — what detractors describe as arrogance — rubbed people the wrong way, including some important LSU supporters and decision-makers, according to sources. That fiery persona may been part of his downfall in a Sunday meeting with Woodward, which went horribly. Kelly left the facility shortly thereafter, a sign to his staff a total overhaul may be afoot.

What was expected to be a change on the offensive staff became LSU deciding it’d rather just reset and find a new man to lead the program.

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Everyone knew this was a critical year for Kelly, but he didn’t lead any of those hot seat rankings at the beginning of the season because of the internal support he still seemed to possess. Some even liked LSU as a title pick after securing the nation’s top-rated transfer portal class in addition to returning one of the SEC’s top quarterbacks in Garrett Nussmeier. But just like James Franklin learned at Penn State: When you go all-in on a season with a heavy influx of NIL and revenue share money and still flop short of expectations, your downfall is accelerated. 

It started good enough. An impressive Week 1 road win over then-top five Clemson raised expectations that LSU was on the right path. It later proved to be a mirage. A loss to Ole Miss on Sept. 27 was discouraging but not backbreaking. That came three weeks later in Nashville when Kelly’s former defensive coordinator at Notre Dame, Clark Lea, got the better of him.

“None of this mattered until they lost to Vanderbilt,” one LSU source said. “That’s it. That’s your tipping point.”

The loss to No. 9 Vanderbilt, in which the Tigers managed only 100 rushing yards, was when the dam began to break. It certainly increased the likelihood that Kelly would make staff changes, starting with offensive coordinator Joe Sloan, who was ultimately fired Monday a day after Kelly. 

A week later, Texas A&M dominated LSU as loud “Fire Kelly” chants rang out inside Tiger Stadium. It prompted boosters to start rallying support to pay Kelly’s massive buyout. With no permanent university president, it created a unique circumstance that ultimately involved Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry. A day that started with Kelly struggling to get into his office ended with him walking out for the last time.

After making the firing official, Woodward said in a statement that LSU would immediately begin a national coaching search for its next hire. There are already plenty of names making the rounds from Ole Miss’ Lane Kiffin to Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman to Tulane’s Jon Sumrall to even former Texas A&M coach Jimbo Fisher, who Woodward hired at A&M and later tried to hire at LSU in 2021 before landing on Kelly. 

At the end of that statement there was a line that some believe sums up the entire saga. Woodward said he was confident LSU would bring in an outstanding coach “who fits our culture and community and embraces the excellence we demand.” 

It was a bar, insiders say, Kelly could not come close to clearing in Baton Rouge.