Brian Kelly laments LSU over 'selfish, undisciplined' penalties

After the LSU Tigers lost the opening game of the 2024 season against the USC Trojans, head coach Brian Kelly lamented the team for having selfish and undisciplined penalties.

Kelly opened his press conference by expressing his frustrations with the team’s discipline and even sharing that he’s angry at the LSU football team over those issues. He also emphasized that the team wasn’t playing a complementary style of football to help themselves win.

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“I think this is the first time since I’ve been here that I’m pretty angry at our football team,” Brian Kelly said. “First of all, from a big picture, we didn’t play complementary football. When we did some good things on the offensive side of the ball, we didn’t compliment that defensively. And vice versa. But the thing that’s most concerning for me is the personal fouls. The penalties that are selfish.”

In the end, LSU lost by a touchdown that USC scored late in the fourth quarter. That score was, in part, set up by a targeting penalty. It was one of several times where the Tigers were hurt by penalties and they finished the game with 10 penalties for 99 yards. That was about double the penalty yardage USC had.

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“Both of them led to scores and they’re undisciplined penalties. Effectively, they fall back on me, and we take pride in running a disciplined program, but we have clearly not done a good enough job there because it impacted the game,” Kelly said.

“The other thing is, unfortunately, it’s clear that when we get up in a game we do not know how to handle ourselves. You’ve got to have a killer instinct in this game. You’ve got to put teams away. We had an opportunity to put this away and we get complacent. We make more mistakes when we’re ahead, instead of having a better focus and a steely-eyed killer instinct. And that’s disappointing.”

Brian Kelly emphasized that his frustrations aren’t just for his team but the coaching staff failing to prepare the Tigers for the game.

“So, I’m angry at those things that I have to do a better job shaping that in this group because we had guys that played hard tonight,” Kelly said. “I mean, we had guys that wanted to win and were prepared to win, but those two things just eat at me and they’ve got to get fixed.

LSU will now have a short week to return home and prepare to bounce back against Nicholls State in Week 2.