Brian Kelly on importance of preparing for potential mismatches: ‘We gotta help his ass’

Mismatches are just part of football and LSU head coach Brian Kelly knows this well. And he knows if you’re not prepared to account for a mismatch, you can quickly get exposed.

That’s especially true playing in the SEC, where the individual talent across the board is not only arguably the best, but the deepest. So as the season approaches and Kelly considers the contingencies, he’s not going to just be coaching as usual in the likely scenario that LSU — especially on offense — is breaking in some new or young talent that could have hiccups.

“If we have a freshman tackle out there going against an All-SEC performer, we gotta help his ass,” Kelly said on Saturday. “We’ve gotta be able to do something. We can’t just call plays as if that doesn’t exists. That exists. If we have a potential situation where we may have a problem blocking a particular guy, we have to have answers for that. If we have a situation where we’re having some problems picking up protections, we have to be able to look at it from the sideline and maybe call it from the sideline. So there’s teaching going on all the time and it’s not just one sided.”

Kelly, specifically, was talking about rolling some young offensive linemen into the lineup during a scrimmage and seeing how they fared against starting defenders.

Naturally, there were some shortcomings.

“And today, offensively, we were struggling in certain aspects because we had some young players out there playing,” Kelly said. “You had Weston Davis matched up against Bradyn Swinson, there’s going to be a mismatch there. You’re going to have Paul Mubenga inside against Jacobian Guillory, there’s going to be some issues there. But it’s also how you build your football team’s depth. You need to have those sandpaper moments, if you will, for the offense as they kind of come into their own and build the depth. We know about Emery [Jones]. We know what he’s going to be able to do. We wanted to see Delly [Garrett Dellinger] at the center position, it gives us more depth and versatility at that position.”

And while these bumps in the road might look bad from the outside looking in, Kelly actually finds that putting younger players to the test now pays dividends down the line.

“And look, as I told our football team, it’s a great coaching experience as well, for our staff and my staff on the offensive side of the ball, if we ever get into these kinds of situations, you have to play a game knowing you may have a potential mismatch. And then you have to adjust accordingly,” Kelly said.