Brian Kelly provides detailed assessment of LSU's competitiveness in SEC

Saturday marked Brian Kelly’s first spring game as LSU head coach. But he still has questions on his roster, and it begs the question about how competitive the Tigers can be this year.

After the game, Kelly provided a detailed assessment of his team. He noted the talent in the running back room and other weapons on offense can make a major impact in 2022. That said, he added there are still some holes on the roster he wants to fill, and he’ll take a closer look at those now that spring ball is over.

“If I started to look at them right now, those backs run really hard,” Kelly said. “You’d better tackle. You’d better get our backs on the ground. And you saw that today. They can catch the ball, come out of the backfield. We’ll continue to work on some things that are, in my eye, some weaknesses, but they bring some traits across the board that I think are highly competitive in this league.

“The receivers, they can go get the football. We need to be a little bit mentally tougher play in and play out, but they can compete at a high level. I like Kole Taylor today. I thought he showed himself more than just a pedestrian player. He’s long, he showed some yardage after the catch. He needs to live impossible in the weight room with us, and if he does that with [Jack] Mashburn, maybe we’ve got something there. That’s an upgrade for us. The o-line gets better. … I thought the offensive line got better as the game went on.

Brian Kelly: ‘We didn’t clear anything up with the quarterback today’

Probably the biggest question Kelly has to answer is who the starting quarterback will be. He has some interesting options, including returning starter Myles Brennan and Arizona State transfer Jayden Daniels. Fans will have to wait a little longer for an answer, though, as Kelly said the spring game didn’t provide any solutions.

In fact, it might have raise more questions.

“The one thing that you all want to know about, we didn’t clear up anything with the quarterback today,” Kelly said. “We probably made it even more difficult. Brennan was good today, right? He does really good things with the football. He knows the offense, he’s smart, he takes care of it. [Garrett] Nussmeier, we talked about Nussmeier’s athletic ability, his arm strength. Daniels is really, really fast and Walker’s got one of the strongest arms on the team.

“So I don’t know if we cleared up anything there and we know defensively that front is really, really good. The safeties tackled so much better today, so that’s kind of a synopsis. Are we done? That was pretty good, wasn’t it? I don’t know how many wins that equals, but that makes us more competitive.”