Honest mistake, perhaps, but next time Brian Kelly might need to stop by LSU’s history department before addressing SEC Media Days.

He kicked off the Southeastern Conference’s big gala Monday, full of the usual preseason excitement and optimism.

“We’ll be celebrating 100 years of Tiger football,” he said of the upcoming season. “We feel like Tiger football has a great history and tradition.”

That, it does.

But the Ol’ War Skul’s math department might also like a word with its head football coach. That football tradition began in 1893, without helmets.

Do the math. Doesn’t add up in the year 2024. What Kelly meant to say was that Tiger Stadium will celebrate 100 mostly very rich years this year.

But Kelly does have both history and math on his side as he starts his third season in Baton Rouge but his 33rd overall as a head coach.

His last three stops before LSU were classic examples of the third year being the charm.

His third team at Central Michigan won the 2006 MAC championship. His third year at Cincinnati the Bearcats won the Big East and went to the Orange Bowl. His third Notre Dame team went 12-0 in the regular season before losing to Alabama in the national championship game.

None of those teams won 10 games in Kelly’s first two years as he has done with LSU.

Oh but times were so much different then. Mostly simpler.

No transfer portal. No NIL money. Conference affiliations that occasionally made sense.

But don’t ask him about any expectations for Year III at LSU.

He doesn’t play that game.

“I deal within a process of how we do things on a day-to-day basis,” he said, surely bringing a smile to face of Nick Saban, who’s working media days as a TV analyst.

But he understood the question.

“Our mission is certainly to win championships,” Kelly said.

He thinks the intangibles, the behind-the-scenes stuff, is coming into place, getting the program where he wants it.

He’d still like to wean himself completely off the transfer portal, but is realistic enough to know that isn’t happening in this day and age.

“The transfer portal is what I always though it would be,” he said. “If you’re in the transfer portal for filling your needs, you haven’t done something right in the natural recruiting season.”

That was LSU last year, he said.

“Never a good situation,” he said. “You need to use the transfer portal to top of the tank, so to speak, right. You can add to a particular position, almost one that’s not needed but becomes a luxury.

“Get to that situation, the transfer portal becomes an effective tool. If it’s strictly need-based, you’re probably in for some rough seas.”

LSU has recruited well. The school’s NIL collective is being streamlined to better compete with other SEC schools. Maybe that was after losing out on two potential defensive line transfers who turned out to be too expensive for the Tigers.

Still, Kelly said, the “process” is working to his vision of team building.

“This is the most accountable our group has been,” he explained. “There is trust within that group. This will be the deepest team that we’ve had.”

All fine and good. But not exactly bulletin board material, no matter how much you ignore outside expectations.

Nobody would say Kelly hasn’t been a successful start at LSU with a pair of 10-win seasons, a trip to the SEC championship game in his first year and a pair of bowl wins.

But, as Kelly said, LSU’s goal will always be to win championships.

“Being the No. 1 offense in the country was not good enough,” Kelly pointed out of last year, when the Tigers led the nation in most of the pertinent offensive statistics.”

It was obvious in a 45-24 season-opening loss to Florida State and it hit critical mass, perhaps, when 637 yards and 49 points wasn’t enough to beat Ole Miss after the Rebels rang up 55 points and 706 yards.

“You have to have much more balance,” Kelly said. “What we’re going to need is that complementary football, offense and defense.

“You can’t have to No. 1 offense in the country and (still) not have the kind of defense necessary to get you to the next level.”

So while LSU lost a Heisman Trophy winner at quarterback and two other first-round pick at receiver, the biggest question mark for the Tigers — still working on the assumption that the offense will be fine — is how much that historically bad defense can improve.

It’s the kind of history Kelly doesn’t want to relive.

—

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