Nice try, Coach, uh … Oh’Kelly is it?

Oh, my bad. Thought that was the way them Boston Irish pronounced Kelly.

Brian Kelly, I guess it is. LSU head football coach Brian Kelly. The O is gone.

But, yeah, we do need to talk.

First off, we probably need for you to talk like you were born, bred and raised to talk and say things proper.

Appreciate the effort.

But, come on now. That was pretty dadgum, doggone, plum-full of awkward at the LSU basketball game the other night.

That introduction to LSU fans could have been worse, I suppose. You could’ve gone full stereotype and tried to force out some French words and really left some heads shaking.

As is, it still appeared like you, Boston area by way of the upper Midwest, prepped for Louisiana by watching “The Waterboy” on the flight from Notre Dame to Baton Rouge.

I wouldn’t even bring this up but it has become a big story nationally, especially on the social media machine, a sad Case of the Fake Southern Accent.

Likely no harm, no foul.

But just don’t be faking it.

That little talk at the basketball game sounded like every bad Southern-fried movie that in reality needed a translator. The highlight was probably butchering the word “family.”

Noted dialectologists the world over — or is it linguists? Whatever — have been carefully analyzing the way “family” came out in a talk when leaving South Bend and the puzzling metamorphosis it underwent from the same lips when uttered at LSU.

Best guess it came out “FAAH-muh-lee” in Baton Rouge with even maybe a few more syllables on the “lee” part.

So it’s possible to try too hard to fit in, especially at first.

It appeared, perhaps, that you were going for your “Brian-Bob” Southern accent, an easy mistake to make in this state.

It might have been more appropriate to shoot for the “T-Brian” accent in these parts, né “Tee-Brian,” but even that is likely to come off as forced.

There really is no one-accent-fits-all in the state, so best not to try. Probably more so than other Southern states.

North Louisiana is a different animal, of course, as is Bunkie. Only select parts of south Louisiana get to do the Cajun thing. The tip of the toe over there is unsettled. A lot of Texas leaks in. New Orleans, now, is a whole different world, much more linguistically akin to Brooklyn than any bayou.

But, just for fun, why don’t you take a stab at “Tchoupitoulas Street” anyway.

Done?

OK. Understand, this state has been through this before. It may be an acquired taste, for sure, but we generally welcome all comers, whatever the accent.

Nick Saban himself introduced “aight” to the vernacular, usually with a question mark and a “relative to” while whipping an underachieving state into the shape he envisioned.

He got along fine.

Les Miles, whew boy, no real accent. But that rascal brought a whole new language to the bayou, this odd juxtaposition of a weird pig-Latin combined with Furbish or Lapland-speak or some such, often punctuated with facial gyrations that made your face ache just to watch.

To be honest, nobody ever knew what in tarnation he was saying, but it seemed like it was funny so we all played along.

The genuine Cajun article was even tried most recently with Ed Orgeron, and I don’t mean no store-bought Cajun.

We talking ma cher amio, back-of-the-bayou Cajun with that dude.

Just remember, everybody loved the way Coach O talked and he got fired down the bayou anyways.

So just be yourself.

Oh, and one other thing. Don’t fall for the ol’ nutria gag, a standard practical joke in the state. They are nothing more than big rats, more nuisance to Louisiana than native.

But no matter what anybody snickers and tries to tell you — and they’ll get a big kick out of trying — we do NOT actually EAT nutria in this state.

Least ways not in public.

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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com