2025-26 Coaching Carousel

[Blbmeb]

Feels like BK is toxic as hell at this point, and he also seems disinterested in coaching. I bet Penn State wishes they had not pulled the trigger on firing JF after seeing all these jobs open up.

Totally agree on all points.

 

[V-Doub]

this LSU coaching search is quickly becoming a dumpster fire that we'll be talking about for years

 

[dom91932]

A $95 million bet gone wrong: Inside Brian Kelly’s last days at LSU

Brian Kelly overhauled Notre Dame once to great success. His approach failed massively at LSU. Why?

www.nytimes.com

A $95 million bet gone wrong: Inside Brian Kelly’s last days at LSU​

Reported by Bruce Feldman, Ralph Russo and Christopher Kamrani
The LSU football operations center, its front doors guarded by a 12-foot-long bronze tiger statue, has been home to both spectacular success and infamous flameouts over the past two decades.

Still, the facility in the shadow of Tiger Stadium had never experienced a scene like the one that played out last Sunday, Brian Kelly’s final day as the head coach of the Tigers.

It wasn’t even 24 hours after LSU had lost 49-25 at home to Texas A&M in what some staffers said was the most embarrassing game they’d been part of. The Tigers’ meltdown emptied one of college football’s most intimidating stadiums. But Sunday was back to business, even if, multiple staffers told The Athletic, nothing about the day felt really “normal.” The program was wooing some of the nation’s top recruits in the football operations center, greeting visitors with its soaring atrium, 170-seat dining hall and a massive wall of plaques commemorating LSU’s 80 first-team All-Americans.

Earlier in the day, Kelly, LSU’s fourth-year coach, had met with his boss, athletic director Scott Woodward, to talk about the direction of the program. Kelly and the Tigers had entered the season with championship expectations, but the loss to Texas A&M dropped LSU to 5-3 and out of the AP Top 25. Through 48 games at LSU, Kelly’s record was 34-14.

For a coach who signed a 10-year, $95 million contract in December 2021, that wasn’t good enough.

In the meeting, Woodward told Kelly it was time to make a change at offensive coordinator, with the Tigers ranking in the back half of the SEC in just about every relevant statistical category and, for the second consecutive season, dead last in rushing.

As staffers tried to impress recruits, the tension that had built around the program became impossible to ignore.

“You’re seeing the bigwigs walking in and out of the building,” an LSU staffer who has spent extensive time in the program told The Athletic. “‘This guy’s fired. That guy’s getting fired.’

“One of the assistants then said, ‘Man, I just saw Kelly walking out of the building with his bag and a smile on his face, and he chucked up the deuces, then got in the car and left.'”

By early evening Sunday, word leaked of a team meeting scheduled for 8 p.m. CT, and everyone around the program knew what that meant: Kelly’s time as LSU’s head coach was over.

The LSU football program is unquestionably one of the most fruitful places to win big, and has been since the turn of the century. Louisiana is a football state where most of the blue-chippers grow up dreaming of playing on Saturday nights in Death Valley. The three head coaches before Kelly all won national championships (Nick Saban in 2003, Les Miles in 2007 and Ed Orgeron in 2019).

LSU’s potential was understandably alluring for Kelly, an immensely confident and successful coach looking for a title to complete his already Hall of Fame-worthy resume after 12 seasons and a school-record 113 victories at Notre Dame.

He believed LSU offered him a chance to win an elusive national championship in a way even Notre Dame could not.

But the blueprint for success is different at LSU than it is for Notre Dame. The entire state is emotionally invested, from the governor’s mansion 3 miles from Tiger Stadium to the farthest Gulf Coast towns. Those blue-chippers might grow up wanting to be Tigers, but they are also being relentlessly recruited by the rest of the SEC. You can’t cultivate the hard-edged ethos of LSU football with corporate slogans from a 30,000-foot view.

“He really stripped the culture of what this place is. You know this place is not regular, man,” the LSU staffer said.

The Athletic spoke with 10 people who have been part of LSU football in recent years and/or have worked for Kelly. They were granted anonymity to provide insight into how Kelly has run his programs and his tenure at LSU.

What they described was a coach who delegated too much authority, didn’t care enough about recruiting and failed to bond with his players; an athletic director who was unusually involved in football day-to-day; and a program with national title aspirations but didn’t function like its rivals.

Kelly declined comment for this story when reached by The Athletic. Woodward has not spoken publicly since Kelly was fired, and was fired himself Thursday night. Assistant head coach Frank Wilson was promoted to interim coach to finish out the regular season.

“I don’t know,” Wilson said this week, “if there’s a ‘one thing’ that went wrong.”

---

Before he arrived at LSU, Kelly, 64, had restored the shine to Notre Dame football after years of decline. He was a driving force behind modernizing the program and making it a consistent national contender for the first time since Lou Holtz in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

At the conclusion of the 2021 regular season, Kelly had a record of 263-95-2 in three decades as head coach at Division II Grand Valley State, Central Michigan, Cincinnati and Notre Dame. He won two D-II national titles, took Cincinnati to Orange and Sugar bowls and became the winningest coach in Notre Dame history. But he never won a title, and he blamed Notre Dame for that.

“I felt like I did everything that I could at Notre Dame and they felt like they did everything they could for me,” Kelly told The Associated Press in the spring of 2022. “I felt like we had both got to a point where this is what they could do, right? This is what I did. And we couldn’t get past that. OK? And so here we are.”

At the same time, LSU had quickly slipped after having one of the best teams in college football history under Orgeron in 2019. Most of the best players left for the NFL, as did a few of his top assistants; defensive coordinator Dave Aranda, for example, took over at Baylor. After the title game, the pandemic hit, and players such as Ja’Marr Chase opted out, gutting the roster. LSU went 5-5 and Orgeron, working for a new boss in Woodward, was on the hot seat not long after the national title banners were hung in the building.

Woodward, an LSU alumnus who returned to Baton Rouge in 2019 after serving as AD at Texas A&M, viewed the football program as disjointed and volatile under Orgeron.

It’s not common for athletic directors to be so involved in football staff hires, but Woodward is different from most ADs. One of Woodward’s first big moves back in Baton Rouge was to push for Orgeron to hire Bo Pelini, a fiery former LSU assistant, to come back as defensive coordinator in 2020.

Woodward, who got his start in politics, had a reputation for splashy hires. He hired Chris Petersen from Boise State to Washington, Jimbo Fisher from Florida State to Texas A&M and, earlier that year, Kim Mulkey from Baylor to lead LSU’s women’s basketball program.

So when Orgeron, who went 11-11 after the national championship, was fired, Woodward added to his reputation by hiring Kelly to clean house and bring structure to LSU.

That’s what Kelly did. He turned over dozens of positions. The first person fired was well-respected strength coach Tommy Moffitt, who was part of all three national title teams at LSU. Now working for Texas A&M, Moffitt was on the other sideline Saturday night, celebrating a victory.

“There were people here that were here for a long time, and I’m not saying that all of them should’ve stayed,” said the LSU staffer. “But that probably should’ve been an evaluation, and that wasn’t done.”

It soon became apparent that Kelly’s LSU was too disconnected from the program’s successful recent past. In many cases, it felt like change for change’s sake. At Notre Dame, that move-fast-and-break-stuff approach worked, whether that was pushing the school to build a new indoor practice facility or altering game day traditions to make players’ schedules more efficient.

But Notre Dame wasn’t a few seasons removed from a national title, and Notre Dame doesn’t live in the same world that LSU does: the hyper-competitive SEC, where the head coach needs to be more than just the recruiting closer, and where seemingly every five minutes a different assistant coach is approaching with a smiling blue-chip recruit on the other end of a FaceTime just hoping to say hello, or hear that you know how many sacks or touchdowns he had last Friday night.

Kelly’s Tigers finished the 2023 season by playing in the ReliaQuest Bowl, despite featuring three first-round picks on offense: Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Jayden Daniels and receivers Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas. Kelly responded with more staff changes, especially on defense.

Woodward was again heavily involved in decisions that led to several coaches and staffers with LSU ties — some of whom had been swept out during the initial purge — being brought back after the 2023 season.

Among the most notable was senior associate AD Austin Thomas, a former personnel staffer under both Miles and Orgeron who had been bouncing around the SEC, from Oxford to Baton Rouge to Knoxville and then to College Station with Woodward. He was then brought back to LSU by Woodward to address recruiting shortcomings and the lack of in-state ties Kelly and his original staff had.

A former LSU staffer said Woodward often met with Thomas to discuss personnel and recruiting. Woodward would pop into a position coach’s office to go over specific recruits, which was baffling for coaches trying to focus on the week’s game planning and upcoming opponent.

“I have never been around an AD who was in the football office more than this guy,” said the former staffer who came to Baton Rouge when Kelly was hired but has since moved on.

It only contributed to the disjointedness of the program. But Kelly did another hard reset for the program. It had worked before.

At Notre Dame, seven years into Kelly’s tenure, the Fighting Irish went 4-8, prompting questions about whether Kelly was connecting with his players and spending enough time around the team.

Kelly overhauled the coaching staff and his own approach, making a concerted effort to be more accessible.

One former assistant coach at Notre Dame credited Kelly with empowering his assistant coaches, establishing accountability from the top while leaning on his staff to implement culture and connectivity with players. He also made a string of excellent hires at defensive coordinator, proving that a head coach is sometimes only as good as his assistants. In that program reboot, Kelly hired Mike Elko, now the Texas A&M head coach, as defensive coordinator, and then promoted Clark Lea, now Vanderbilt’s head coach, from linebackers coach to DC. (Ironically, both put the nails in Kelly’s time at LSU.)

It worked. Kelly rattled off five straight double-digit win seasons and passed Knute Rockne as the winningest coach in Notre Dame history a little more than two months before he made the startling move to LSU.

A similar approach failed to produce similar results at LSU.

“I never saw the guy,” a former staff member said, adding that many of the college coaches he had worked for previously tried to cultivate a family atmosphere.

A former LSU player said many players on the team felt like they didn’t have a relationship with Kelly. He didn’t seem to know the first names of multiple players, the former player said, which led to a permeating culture of distrust.

“Guys didn’t feel like he meant what he said. Everyone could feel that in the building,” the former player said. “It was just the style of coaching. If you don’t truly know someone, you just see it all as a facade.”

When the player, a former starter, decided he was going to transfer from LSU, he was informed by his position coaches that he would have a one-on-one meeting with Kelly to discuss why he wanted to leave. But Kelly never showed up to the meeting, according to the former player. Asked if he was surprised that Kelly’s tenure in Baton Rouge was cut short, the former player said no.

“There’s no tolerance, no patience from the fan base for anything that’s not excellence, and he didn’t bring that,” the player said.

Other former LSU players went public with their feelings after Kelly’s firing. In the hours after the dismissal, Nabers posted a not-so-subtle video clip on his Instagram story of a foot kicking a pile of rocks. Former LSU defensive back Matthew Langlois posted on X that he was forced to medically retire in 2024 and unloaded on Kelly as a coach and leader.

The father of former LSU wide receiver Kyren Lacy, who died by suicide in April after his alleged involvement in a fatal car crash, publicly criticized Kelly after his firing. Former LSU safety Greg Brooks Jr., who was diagnosed with a brain tumor, filed suit against LSU last year for negligence, and Brooks’ father said Kelly did not reach out to his son during his medical ordeal, which Kelly denied.

Charles Turner, LSU’s starting center during Kelly’s first two seasons in Baton Rouge, told The Athletic last year that he hardly had any personal interactions with Kelly.

“I started every game for him,” Turner said. “We never talked X’s and O’s. I never sat in his office and got personal with him. He really never got to know me. He’s definitely a good coach, but as far as championships and all that other stuff, you gotta come a different way with your players. You have to let your players know that you really got ’em.”

The current staffer said Kelly has a perception problem, and he failed to realize that in the name, image and likeness era, team building and fostering relationships with players was even more important for the head coach.

“He’s a decent enough guy, but I’ll be honest, the effort just is not there,” said the staffer, “especially for what this place is and compared to what we’re competing against. We always had to recruit around him.”

Even amid NIL and the robust transfer portal, recruiting is a full-time job — especially in the SEC. The most successful coaches — Georgia’s Kirby Smart and Saban, who won six national titles at Alabama before retiring — embrace it. The coach Kelly succeeded, Orgeron, was obsessed with it.

Kelly never did it that way.

“At one point, I brought my phone over to him and said, ‘Coach, I need you to talk to this kid.’ He says, ‘Make an appointment.’ I said, ‘An appointment? I got him on the phone right now. What are you talking about?’” said a second former staffer, who added that LSU’s competitors would “use that against us: ‘He’ll (Kelly) never talk to you guys. He doesn’t even know the players’ names.’”

Owning a fertile football state such as Louisiana, it’s hard for LSU not to sign highly rated classes. The past two ranked in the top 10 nationally.

But even with the uptick in recruiting the past two years, this year’s roster needed to be bolstered by the transfer portal because the first two signing classes under Kelly didn’t bear enough fruit. And the players who did pan out, such as offensive linemen Will Campbell and Emery Jones Jr. and tight end Mason Taylor — all of whom had committed to LSU when Orgeron was coach — moved on to the NFL after three years.

Kelly boasted about how LSU stepped up its NIL game to land one of the best portal classes in the country. The Tigers would come into 2025 with an $18 million roster that could — at least when it comes to the price tag — stack up with some of the best in the country.

On the field, many of last year’s problems persisted. LSU has the worst running game in the SEC for the second straight season, and talented quarterback Garrett Nussmeier hasn’t gotten enough help to compensate for it.

A strong defense helped LSU get out to a 4-0 start and rise to No. 3 in the rankings, but it was fool’s gold. Kelly scolded a reporter who asked about the listless offense after LSU beat Florida 20-10 in September, later apologizing, but eventually the offensive struggles caught up to the Tigers.

“We kicked our O-line’s ass too much in the spring, and that scared me,” another current LSU staffer said.

They weren’t talented enough nor did they have the edge needed to survive the SEC, in perhaps its most competitive year ever. The week before losing to Texas A&M, LSU lost to Vanderbilt, now ranked No. 9, for the first time since 1990.

“It’s not the old days — and when I say the old days, I mean like five years ago — where you could just load up on talent and have depth, you could win 70 percent of your games with your C-plus game,” the first LSU staffer said. “It’s like the NFL now. You’ve gotta hit on your evaluations, especially the big-money guys, your five-stars, you gotta hit there.

“Coaching matters. Scheme matters. And where we missed here, is those guys that are really getting paid money, they have to want to play for you. Or else it’ll be transactional to them. And that matters when it comes to coming together as a team.”

Nothing about Kelly’s time at LSU suggested this team was on the verge of coming together. It was getting worse, not better. His bold prediction at the end of last season, after defeating 6-6 Oklahoma, that he and his team “were taking receipts” of the doubters, and that his Tigers “would see you in the national championship,” felt like a punchline.

And so Sunday played out like a program on fire, and LSU — with an interim president, an interim athletic director and a governor publicly hijacking the direction of the program — will try and salvage the rest of its season.

“He just lacks the authenticity,” the first LSU staffer said. “And I don’t want to dance on his grave, like I see a lot of people doing, but you could almost tell that he cashed out here.”

All the uncertainty at the top of LSU is a less-than-ideal way to launch a search when coaches crave alignment and clarity when it comes to who they report to and the chain of command. Thursday on the “The Pat McAfee Show,” Gov. Landry said, “Everyone is in agreement in Louisiana, the next coach we hire is going to have a patently different contract.”

Ready or not, LSU is heading back into the market.

 

[doublewing]

Brian Kelly to Penn State anyone??????

If he wants a job he'll get one, but I would bet it's a lower tier P4 job and none of the ones open now. He's way too much of an asshole for most schools to want to deal with him and is getting up in age.

PSU is really interested in Brian Hartline. That would be a good hire and I'm assuming that one of the top schools with openings will get him in this cycle.

 

[Kazman5k]

Anyone able to see this?

 

[Carm]

Anyone able to see this?

here you go, Kazman