Brian Kelly confirms Omar Speights will be in LSU's defensive rotation vs. Ole Miss

LSU transfer linebacker Omar Speights will return to the Tigers’ lineup Saturday for the team’s matchup versus Ole Miss, head coach Brian Kelly told reporters Thursday.

“He’ll be in the rotation,” Kelly said. “Practiced well this week. But he can’t handle the volume that would be required.”

Speights transferred in the offseason from Oregon State after earning All-Pac-12 honors in 2022. He played in the first two games of the Tigers season but he missed the previous two weeks with a hip flexor injury.

Kelly said that Speights is healthy but the team doesn’t want to overextended him against a dynamic Rebels offense that can wear people out.

“I would say he’s 100%,” Kelly said. “But when you’re talking about player load, to go from not playing in two weeks and then giving him — look, it’s a fast-tempo offense. You’re really talking about quality reps, and he’s going to fatigue. It just makes sense that we’re on top of that, and be really careful that we integrate him back in the game in the right manner.”

True freshman Whit Weeks has started the past two weeks in place of Speights in the Tigers defense. He has 21 tackles on the season with 0.5 sacks. In the two games he started, Weeks notched eight and nine tackles, respectively.

He was the No. 146 overall recruit in the 2023 recruiting class, according to the On3 Industry Ranking, a weighted average that utilizes all four major recruiting media companies.

Speights and Major Burns each head a team-high eight tackles in LSU’s season-opening defeat to Florida State. In the second game of the year versus Grambling, Speights had only one tackle.

The fifth-year linebacker had 89 tackles as a junior for the Beavers in 2021 and 83 tackles as a senior in 2022.

Even though he won’t be playing for every down of LSU’s time on defense, Speights will likely be productive in his time on the field Saturday. He averaged 6.84 tackles per game in his career heading into this season.

“Each series, we get a better feel for what their game plan is and see how they want to attack us,” Kelly said. “Then, we’ll make our adjustments relative to the personnel that we want in the game. If it becomes much more of a spread game where they want to try to get us out of the box, we’ll make what we consider to be the appropriate personnel adjustments.”