Brian Kelly: LSU is going to have to go through the growing pains on defense

In his first season as the head coach at LSU, Brian Kelly won the SEC West and a 10-4 record. That led to high expectations for 2023 that LSU hasn’t quite lived up to nearing the middle of the season, seemingly due to the Tigers’ defense.

Still, Kelly believes that the currently struggling defense was a huge part of LSU’s success in 2022.

“If you look at the games we won last year,” Brian Kelly said. “Start with Auburn, we won the Auburn game and the way we played defensively, taking the football away. If you look at the Arkansas game last year and the kind of defensive performances. Clearly, defense won games for us.”

Brian Kelly explained that last year’s teams had several veteran players, which this year’s doesn’t. Now, the defense is going through growing pains.

“We had a lot of veteran players. You’re talking about Joe Foucha, Greg Brooks. We lost Mekhi Garner, Jarrick Bernard-Converse. That’s a veteran group in the back end of the defense that made a lot of plays for us. So, look, we know where we’re at,” Kelly said.

“We’re playing a combination of 15 freshmen and transfers, and they’re young and inexperienced and they’ve got to grow and there’s gonna be some growing pains. I said that at the start of the season when you take that many guys, there’s a red flag. We’re gonna have to go through these growing pains, but we’re gonna keep fighting and we’re gonna keep teaching, we’re gonna keep coaching.”

In LSU’s loss to Ole Miss, much of the blame comes down to the defense’s inability to get stops, especially late in the game. LSU gave up 55 points, 21 of which came in the fourth quarter. On top of that, Ole Miss gained 706 total yards, including 389 passing and 317 rushing yards.

“The blame does not lie at the feet of one person. This is a collective situation where we’ve got to coach better and we’ve got to play better,” Kelly concluded.

Brian Kelly identifies inexperience as issue with tackling

One of LSU’s biggest issues against Ole Miss was the team’s tackling. This is an issue that Brian Kelly pointed to the team’s inexperience for.

“One’s a true freshman. One’s playing for his first time, in Laterrance Welch, ever on the road. I could go on, I mean, we were playing with inexperienced young players. And that’s who we have, there’s nobody else walking through the door. I mean, we don’t have another corner. These are the guys that have to play for us,” Kelly said.

“We have to continue to develop them, they have to continue to work at getting better each and every week. And, and that’s where we’re at. And so we got to keep rolling them out there and they got to get thick skin, they got to keep working on tackling. And they got to keep working on leveraging the football, they got to keep getting off blocks.”