16 Pictures of LSU Football Coach Brian Kelly Not Having Fun

Fans of the LSU Football program have been going through some things over the last few weeks. The team was once favored to qualify for the College Football Playoffs, but now the team is just trying to earn a bowl bid that feels good.

Yes, LSU is bowl eligible, but they're 6-4 and 3-3 in the SEC. For a team that was looking at a spot in the College Football Playoffs, ending the year with a 6-6 record, or a 7-5 record, doesn't sit right. LSU has 2 games left, a pair of home games with Vanderbilt (Saturday November 23rd) and Oklahoma (Saturday November 30th). If they win both, they will end the regular season 8-4, with no SEC Championship Game or College Football Playoff invites.

For a team that won the SEC West in Head Coach Brian Kelly's first year, and had a Heisman Trophy winner in his second year, a drop like this wasn't what fans were expecting.

This year was supposed to be a big year for Brian Kelly's LSU...Nick Saban left Alabama, turmoil continuing at Florida, Georgia didn't look as dominant as they have been, Oklahoma entering the SEC with question marks. There were pretty high expectations for LSU. The SEC seemed ripe for the picking.

But here we are.

LSU couldn't get it done in the first week of the season against a USC team that is now 5-5 overall and scraping for a bowl bid. The got dog-walked by Texas A&M, boat raced by Alabama inside Tiger Stadium, and then got beat by Florida and a backup QB.

This same LSU team went into a hostile South Carolina game and got a big road win, pulled out a gutsy OT win over a top-10 Ole Miss team, and overpowered an upstart Arkansas team in Fayetteville. Needless to say, this LSU team is volatile and inconsistent.

So what to do about it?

Brian Kelly was supposed to fix things in Baton Rouge. Many felt like legendary Head Coach Ed Orgeron had let the program go, leaving it in disarray. Coach O won a National Championship, and led the Tigers to a season that many consider to be the greatest college football season of all time. But some fans, and boosters, wanted Coach O gone because they felt like LSU Football had become too loose...too much like a party.

Insert Brian Kelly, the guy from Notre Dame. The suit and tie, the disciplinarian, the cleaner.

Fans were told "look what he did with Notre Dame's education requirements. Imagine what he can do with LSU's talent pool", and that kind of made sense. But now that things aren't working, we see what that is really like.

It might be that the type of players that Notre Dame (and some of Brian Kelly's other stops) are filled with work better with Brian Kelly's type of coaching. See, Notre Dame is filled with a lot of kids who want to go to Notre Dame for school. They have high academic standards, and students celebrate when they're accepted (even for pure academic reasons) because they want that degree.

With all due respect, football players go to LSU because they want to play in the NFL. They're not in Baton Rouge for a degree in economics, they're there for the economics.

Brian Kelly is used to players who have to take an offer to Cincinnati or Central Michigan, because they don't have SEC offers. He's used to players at Notre Dame who are there for reasons outside of football too. These schools have football players that want to remain at those schools. LSU has players who could start on any team in the nation, and will leave tomorrow.

These players respond to different types of coaching and different personalities. Brian Kelly's style seems to clash with the type of players he has. While Coach O seemed to get great responses from the type of players LSU draws.

Maybe the same reasons that some people wanted Coach O gone are the same reasons he worked well in Baton Rouge.

Lets look at the Heisman speeches between Brian Kelly's winning quarterback and Ed Orgeron's winning quarterback. First, Jayden Daniels when he thanked Brian Kelly (its at 2:18 in the video):

Daniels lumps Kelly in with the rest of the LSU coaches, and wraps it up in one or two sentences.

Then, there's Joe Burrow's speech. When Burrow goes through his speech, Coach Ed Orgeron is referenced a few times, but when we get to the 6:30 mark in this video, you see what kind of emotion Coach O draws out of his players...

Joe Burrow brought to tears just thinking about Ed Orgeron. Talks about how much the Coach means to his family, tells him he's forever grateful, and declares that LSU should give him a lifetime contract.

Both of these players have the same trajectory with these two coaches. Daniels and Burrow were both transfers from other conferences, they both played two years under their head coach, and they both won the Heisman. So why two totally different responses to their coaches?

Sure, Burrow and Daniels are different guys, but that is a BIG difference in the way you speak about someone else.

At the end of the day, LSU still owes Brian Kelly $61 million over the next 6-7 years, so its unlikely that he's going anywhere. But that doesn't mean fans can't let him know how they feel.