BATON ROUGE — Say what you will about Brian Kelly.

He said some curious things himself Saturday. Perhaps he was getting a little too excited about beating an Oklahoma team that, although a big-name brand, won only two Southeastern Conference games in its first season in the league.

But the 37-17 win over the Sooners should at least silence the suggestions that Kelly had “lost the locker room.”

Those were the stage whispers in the wake of the Tigers’ three-game losing streak — now silenced after beating Vanderbilt and Oklahoma to close the regular season.

The anti-Kelly naysayers among the finger-pointers need to ditch that angle and find some other incriminating evidence.

Forget the scoreboards, even the better execution. With nothing more to play for than pride and the pseudo bragging rights between 7-5 and 8-4, you don’t play as hard and as focused as the Tigers did over the last two games if you’ve given up on your coaching staff.

One way to look at it is that in the final two regular season games LSU beat two teams that beat the same Alabama team that handed LSU its most embarrassing loss.

In his opening statement to the media, Kelly saw the recovery as, “We’re taking receipts, and we’ll see you at the national championship.”

So …

Wait! Say that again. What’d we miss?

I know it was a nutso rivalry weekend that scrambled the College Football Playoff picture into a jumbled mess. But it didn’t get whacky enough to find room for a team that, for all its late redemption, still finished 8-4 overall and in a six-way tie for fourth place in the final SEC standings at 5-3 (the tie-breaker for which is likely still short-circuiting data bases).

The three-game losing streak (to Texas A&M, Alabama and Florida) did not go away because LSU just beat two teams that combined for five conference wins. Maybe it gets even more frustrating to learn that winning just a specific one of those three — specifically, Florida — would have put the Tigers in the SEC championship game once the tie-breaker dust settled.

Upon further investigation, it turned out Kelly’s bold prediction was just confidence in the more distant future. He didn’t give an exact date for this upcoming national championship, which would make him the fourth straight LSU coach to claim one.

But maybe he hears the clock ticking.

“The standard is the standard, here, right?” he said. “I didn’t come down here to go 8-4. I’m not happy about 8-4. Nobody in that room is it happy about being 8-4. What they’re happy about is they played well after a three-game losing streak, and they bounced back … They easily could have fractured, but they stuck together.”

Give them that.

In fact, the Tiger Stadium sayonara game for the season showed fans a lot of the things that were so often missing.

A little late, perhaps, but …

For starters, Kelly often noted that, in three of LSU’s four losses, the Tigers held second half leads but couldn’t close the deal.

“Really should have won those games,” he said.

No problem Saturday as the Tigers totally dominated the second half instead of having to nurse home a 24-17 halftime lead.

If it wasn’t LSU’s best game of the season, it was the most complete.

Other missing pieces of the puzzle also finally showed up, if only to at least give a hint of what the Tigers had hoped to be this season.

The running game continued its progress to be an occasional factor against a defense that held Alabama to three points last week.

There was the long-awaited appearance of the promised deep threat, Chris Hilton.

Best known for igniting a social media melt-down when (according to lip-readers) Kelly called him “uncoachable” during sideline tirade after a missed opportunity during the Florida fiasco, he must have learned something. All he did was catch touchdowh bombs of 40 and 45 yards.

Kelly even gave him the game ball.

It should have gone to Garrett Nussmeier, but that’s quibbling. The LSU quarterback looked done for the game with a shoulder injury — and the LSU offense was lost with backup A.J. Swann — before Nussmeier made a gutsy return from X-rays and threw both long passes to Hilton.

He even ran for a couple of improvised first downs, which might have gotten the biggest cheers of the night.

Oklahoma had a more naturally mobile option in Jackson Arnold, a rascally quarterback in the mold of Alabama’s Jalen Milroe. Arnold had his moments, but they were very few, and the LSU defense never let him take control of the game.

The biggest play of the night, however, might have come right after the Sooners took their only lead of the night, 14-10, midway through the second quarter.

That’s when Aaron Anderson returned the ensuing kickoff 100 yards for a score, the first return of Anderson’s career and the first return touchdown, kick or punt, in Kelly’s three seasons.

None of this is going to get the Tigers into the playoffs this season. It was for entertainment purposes only.

But, apparently, Kelly is making plans for that day.

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

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