Brian Kelly addresses his mindset entering Mississippi State week: 'Success breeds confidence'

Brian Kelly has an interesting mindset for his LSU squad following his first win as their coach.

After finding some success against Southern, Kelly is expecting that to carry over into their showdown with Mississippi State this weekend. Speaking with the media, the Tigers leader revealed he believes his team’s confidence level will be raised at practice, and against the Bulldogs.

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“Every game that they play, our guys, is going to be an opportunity for growth. You want that growth to happen through success. Success obviously breeds confidence. Confidence then is an accelerator in what you’re doing. Everybody can move forward. Everybody tends to question themselves if the outcomes aren’t right,” stated Kelly. “So yes to your question, but we’re not going into the game look at it from that perspective. Really, I’m going into this game with the challenge of how we prepare differently this week with such a, we have to have a better week of preparation than we did last week. The competition is keener and better, we have to get our guys to elevate that preparation. That’s what I’ll be looking for.

“If we get that, we’ll play much better and the outcome will probably be where we need it to be.”

It’s been an uneven start to the Brian Kelly era at LSU, but defeating Mississippi State in his first SEC action would go a long way. The Tigers will be looking for a huge victory on Saturday.

Brian Kelly opens up on his relationship, familiarity with Mike Leach

As Brian Kelly preps for his first conference game as LSU’s head coach — the Tigers face Mississippi State at home — he reminisced about how he and Mike Leach, the Bulldogs head coach, go way back. 

Even though the SEC is new to Kelly, the people aren’t always, as he and Leach knew other back in their days at Grand Valley State and Iowa Wesleyan, respectively. From there to the big time in the SEC west, it’s been a long road.

“I’ve known him for quite some time,” Kelly said. “Obviously, the tree that he is in — have many, many acquaintances. I’ve known him since the days I was at Grand Valley State and he was at Iowa Wesleyan. We shared a lot of common acquaintances in the business itself.”

Since crossing paths back during the fledgling days of their coaching careers, Kelly and Leach have coached at a number of places. Kelly has been the head coach at Central Michigan, Notre Dame and now LSU since his time at GVSU. Leach has been the coach at Texas Tech, Washington State and now Mississippi State.

While their personal coaching styles and on-the-field schemes on offense and defense vary greatly, Kelly has taken plenty from Leach, and surely vice versa. And while no one will be mistaking LSU’s offense for Leach’s air raid attack — or the other way around — the give and take is ongoing.

“We’ve gotten the chance to know quite a bit about the offensive structures,” said Kelly. “There’s a lot of concepts that he’s run that I was running about 25 years ago as well. So, we have obviously run into each other many times along our careers.”