There’s a lot riding on this Week 1 matchup between the No. 9 LSU Tigers and No. 4 Clemson Tigers for LSU head coach Brian Kelly.
He hasn’t won a season opener yet as head coach at LSU, and the Bayou Bengals are 0-5 in season openers dating back to the Ed Orgeron era.
In the bigger picture, LSU has yet to make the College Football Playoff with Kelly as head coach, and heading into Year 4, the pressure in Baton Rouge is at an all-time high.
Beating Clemson on the road would be a huge feather in LSU’s cap right away in this early season, and this is a game that the Tigers have been preparing for all offseason.
It’s not just about preparation for Kelly, though. There’s an old saying it football that goes like this: “It’s not about the X’s and O’s, it’s about the Jimmy’s and Joe’s”.
What that means is the more talented team usually comes away the winner, and Kelly alluded to that on Wednesday on an SEC conference call. In the process, though, he may have taken a little bit of a jab at his past LSU teams.
“Well in terms of the opener, we upgraded our roster,” Kelly said, according to Thomas Goldkamp of On3. “And I think that that’s probably at the end of the day the biggest thing. Look, everybody talks about iron sharpening iron. We didn’t have iron all the time. We had iron vs. butter. Butter doesn’t like iron.”
Calling half of his roster over the past three seasons basically “soft as butter” won’t make Kelly any friends with the LSU squads from 2022, 2023 and 2024. At this point, Kelly doesn’t have the luxury of thinking about friendship, though.
He needs to think about winning, and winning big, and that’s why bringing in more talent has been the focus of this offseason for LSU.
Kelly’s transfer class was ranked No. 1 in the country after LSU brought in several intriguing players this offseason via the transfer portal.
In all, 18 fresh faces were brought aboard in the portal. That’s new talent for Kelly and his staff, but it also helps LSU’s depth this season.
“The competition in camp was so much different when you have the kind of depth that we have built here,” Kelly said. “It’s taken time, right? We still have some work to do.”
That work begins on Saturday at Clemson’s Memorial Stadium.
