Brian Kelly describes the importance of bowl practices

Brian Kelly loves additional time with his team and LSU’s postseason will allow the extra practice ahead of the bowl game.

The Tigers take on Wisconsin in the ReliaQuest Bowl on New Year’s Day, so it gives LSU plenty of time to prepare. Not only that, players who need extra time on the field get it.

Kelly also noted the redshirt rule, where you can play players in four games and still preserve a year of eligibility.

“They’re important,” Kelly said. “Here’s why they’re equally as important as any other time. When we’re balancing our roster. I’ll give you an example. The Howard kid, right? We held on to him at the three game max until A&M and then we put them in against A&M, played pretty good. And so he used his fourth game and that last year, we’re excited about playing him in the bowl game, because he gets that extra game. 

“And so that’s what makes this even better because once they gave us the extra game for the bowl, now you can play all these guys that got to the limit of four. And really, let’s see what they’ve got because now they’re a full semester or almost a full year in your program, and they’re ready to go out and compete. So I think that adds to it in terms of development and playing guys that have gotten there for games.”

Looking at the bowl game, it’s still unknown if Heisman-winning quarterback Jayden Daniels will play. But overall, Kelly has a good idea of who will play in a few weeks.

“Yeah, I think we have a really good sense of the players that will be available for the bowl game,” Kelly said. “For me to stand here and tell you exactly what those players are, I couldn’t do that. But I would say that we spent most of last week — we spent all of last week doing exit interviews with our players. So, last week was really about our players.”

And with player exit interviews out of the way, the attention turns to the staff.

“This week, we’re really recruiting,” Kelly said. “And then we’ll get to other evaluations within the staff. Once recruiting goes dead and our coaches responsibilities have completed — they have responsibilities and they have to finish off their responsibilities to LSU — then we’ll do evaluations of staff and so that’s another week away.

“But, as it relates to our players, we feel like we’re in a pretty good position, relative to who we think is playing and any of that information will come out here in the next week or so.”