HOUSTON — You can tell that it gnaws at LSU head coach Brian Kelly.

Maybe that’s why Kelly slammed his fist on the podium immediately after the Tigers’ season-opening loss to Southern Cal in Las Vegas. Perhaps he realized then and there where this season was headed, what he and the Tigers would be relegated to.

But, yes, LSU will spend New Year’s Eve afternoon as a warm-up act, a cover band, so to speak, before the real games, the important matches, begin that night and then continue to ring in the New Year itself with three more games that really, really, really matter throughout the next day.

Wednesday comes the high drama.

On Tuesday Kelly and the Tigers will again be off-Broadway, playing before they pop the corks on the champagne bottles.

LSU vs. Baylor in the Kinder’s  Texas Bowl. Kinder’s, fittingly, is a BBQ rub of some sort and the California company also dabbles in sauces and other fixin’s. Not the main course or featured dish.

And that’s where LSU finds itself in the postseason again — part of the undercard.

It will most likely be a good game. Entertaining, at the least.

Most of bowl games have been just that so far, and delightfully so.

My feeling has always been that there’s no such thing as a meaningless bowl game.

But the Texas Bowl, no matter the hijinks and gridiron mischief, will still be one of those games where the common fans watching on the tube — the ones with no rooting interest — will be thinking, Can we just get this over with and move on to the playoff games that matter. Get on with the Main Event already,

Win or lose, the Tigers will finish the season Tuesday — fresh out of games — then go home and start getting ready for next season.

The idea at this time of year, of course, is to be winning to play another day, to be moving on in the College Football Playoffs.

So this season at 8-4 (thus far) was sort of OK. Good but not great. In other words, not good enough. Maybe you’d even downgrade it to mediocre.

With the CFP ballooned up to 12 teams, LSU’s minimum goal should be to be a part of it — not to provide stay-busy viewing to get people gearing up for the big games.

Only Alabama has won more national championships this century than the three LSU has won under three different head coaches.

All of Bama’s six national titles came under Nick Saban. Only one of LSU’s needed Saban.

And it wasn’t the 2019 team that gets mentioned as the best of all time.

So it can be done with the Tigers. It’s not unreasonable to expect it.

But when again?

LSU fans seem to be getting a bit antsy about it. It’s three years in now since Kelly left Notre Dame for LSU and … still crickets on the championship front.

Remember, that is why Kelly — a certified, card-carrying northern Yankee— came south in the first place. LSU supposedly offered a better chance at the national championship that eluded him in South Bend.

Resources, access to talent, etc.

So here the Tigers are, playing on the undercard, and … oh, the irony.

The supposed “championship-challenged” Notre Dame program that Kelly left behind is not only in the CFP, the Irish have already won their opening playoff game last week under his replacement, Marcus Freeman.

LSU’s chances — whatever they were on a team with some obvious flaws — disappeared with an ugly three-game losing in midseason.

They recovered to win their last two, but as Kelly admitted, angrily, after beating Oklahoma handedly to finish the regular season, “I didn’t come here to go 8-4.”

Kelly’s job wasn’t and isn’t on the line, but the budding frustration has, at the least, lured  out the partial explanation that it’s a moot point with his $10 million buy-out.

Meanwhile, Kelly has had to adjust his thinking about the path to any LSU championship.

Early on, he was leery of the new-fangled transfer portal, seemingly dipping into it only begrudgingly, maybe while holding his nose.

He’s certainly come around on it, however. He’s jumping into it with both feet, with a portal class right now that the “experts” are ranking in the top three nationally.

None of them, however, will have any effect on Tuesday’s Texas Bowl.

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics for the American Press. You can email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com