What Brian Kelly likes better about LSU compared to Notre Dame
LSU coach Brian Kelly took a subtle shot at Notre Dame at SEC Media Days on Monday. Then a not so subtle one.
The former came when Kelly was on the set of SEC Now after his 30-minute fielding of questions from reporters from all over the region at the main ballroom podium. He said LSU enabled him to do things away from football he never had the chance to do at Notre Dame.
Or Grand Valley State, Central Michigan and Cincinnati, for that matter.
“The environment that’s created and then the welcoming of the family to it, it becomes like— I’ve never done this before. I became a fan,” Kelly said. “I don’t know what a fan is like, right? I usually have them throw stuff at me. But to go sit with my wife and my family at a baseball game and watch it and be a fan is something I’ve never had in my career. It was fun.”
Then Kelly was asked a more pointed question about Notre Dame on radio row. In an interview with SiriusXM College Sports Radio, Kelly compared the football-related aspects — most notably, recruiting — of coaching at Notre Dame vs. LSU.
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This is everything he said.
“Well, I don’t think you have to wear a tie every day at the job if you know what I mean. It’s a little bit more relaxed from that perspective. That’s not good or bad, but there is a much more relaxed [feeling] because you’re in the south. You’re around people that are very easy to get along with. Not that they were hard to get along with, but there are rules you have to follow in an environment like Notre Dame. And you can’t cross those lines. So there is a little bit of a difference there.
“I would say the biggest one other than that small narrative that I gave you is that I had to be on a plane and I had to pull the best player out of California, out of Texas, out of New Jersey. I don’t have to do that at LSU. The best player in the state of Louisiana, if we do a really good job recruiting him, he wants to be a Tiger. That’s a difference that, more than anything else, allows you to really focus on what’s important within your program and that is the state of Louisiana and player development.”
So, two things that have grown on the Massachusetts-born, Midwest-hardened Kelly other than gumbo and jambalaya: the Bayou Bengals’ sports scene and the talent-rich recruiting landscape of his new home state.
