NEW ORLEANS — Brian Kelly’s LSU career begins tonight in the exact site where the last three Tiger head coaches won national championships.

That would be the Superdome, a familiar party house for LSU fans but just another first-ever purple-and gold adventure for the veteran Kelly.

Few seem to doubt that Kelly, who was Notre Dame’s all-time winningest coach before bolting for Baton Rouge, will eventually get it done, to join Nick Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron to become the fourth consecutive LSU head coach to win a national championship.

That was the main reason, Kelly has said, he was willing to bolt the Golden Dome for an LSU program that has fallen on hard times since putting together one of college football’s most dominant seasons during the 2019 undefeated national championship run.

The question is, when?

It’s not likely to be this year, but the first clue of where the Kelly Era might be heading comes tonight in the Superdome, where LSU is 8-1 this century, the lone loss coming to Alabama in the national championship following the 2011 season.

It will be Kelly’s first game to coach in the Superdome, although he’s more familiar with Florida State as his Notre Dame team opened last season with a 41-38 overtime victory over the Seminoles in Tallahassee.

But this is different. And LSU, coming off its first losing season (6-7) since 1999, is certainly much different as Kelly has brought wholesale changes to the program from top to bottom, from the transfer-infused roster to the support staff to the way he practices.

That was the build up to this opener, with “accountability” as his catch word for returning the Tigers to national prominence.

“I feel really good that our team has understood and really bought into the process of preparing themselves for this opener,” he said. “There will be challenges along the way, some ups and downs, that we’re going to have to handle. But I feel good about based on how we’ve handled things since December.”

One change will be on display hours before kickoff.

For night games — of which he will have many at LSU — Kelly always likes to bring his teams to the stadium for a post-breakfast walk-through before heading back to the team hotel, a more common practice for basketball shoot-arounds.

It might surprise early tailgaters, but Kelly just likes to break the long wait and anxiety leading up to the game, and says he will do the same for Tiger Stadium’s night games.

“Mondays through Fridays are anxious because I worry about all the things,” Kelly said. “Those are the things we talk about every day in practice … and we see things crop up, right.

“Then you just go and hope your preparation will hold, that everything you do from December has addressed everything that goes into winning.

“But once you get to Saturday (or Sunday in this case) you know all those little things that go into it.”

So what kind LSU should fans expect of their new coach on game day.

There was a time, he said, when he spent a lot of time hollering and screaming on the sideline. Not so much anymore.

“I have my moments like everybody else,” he said. “You have to be demanding, but you can’t be demeaning at any time.”

And he won’t change the way he has always run a game from the sideline.

“Look, I like to use analytics in the game,” Kelly said. “We’ll have somebody with an analytic book just so everybody knows.

“So when we second-guess the head coach later … I use the book and sometimes I use my gut.”

Imagine that. LSU fans second-guess a coach?

The first chance comes tonight.