By KACE KIESCHNICK, Tiger Rag Staff Reporter
The Tigers kicked off the Lane Kiffin era in Tiger Stadium with a 51-10 throttling of coach Dabo Swinney’s Clemson on Saturday night in Tiger Stadium. Kiffin met with media after his debut as the LSU head coach.
Here is everything he said:
Opening Statement
“Good to get to 1-0. I think it was a really good job by our players with all the questions about how would they be with what most people think are distractions, and they did a great job. You think about you come out against a quality ACC team and screw up the first series and give them the ball and give three points, and you go on a 51 to nothing run after that. It’s a lot of players focused. A lot of players doing a really good job, and a stat I always look at is first down. You got to do a lot of things right besides just explosive plays. 38 first downs in a game, a lot of people doing things right. Thirty-five is the most in the history of the school, so impressive first night by the guys. Sam Leavitt started a little slow and played really well, which he’s done all camp, so that was good to see. A lot of credit to our players, assistant coaches, really good game plans. Blake (Baker) obviously on defense, I think before we went two-deep backups there, I think we’d only given up three first downs through three quarters — in total, 1/13 on third downs, so really good job there. Pleased with our players, get to 1-0. We’re gonna have to continue to improve, work on things, but I said in the last interview, I’m happy for our fans. I’m happy for our university, our leadership, a lot of things said about a lot of people this week and how this game may go and happy for all them.”
What do you make of the relentlessness of the defense and the game plan Blake Baker schemed up?
“It’s interesting doing a lot of these games. (Kirk) Herbstreit and their whole group yesterday, they come in and they ask a lot of questions. You go over the roster, and I didn’t really realize it. They said, ‘This is the first time in all the games for all the years that we’ve done with you that you started talking about the defense,’ and we got really good players over there. That’s what I told the team, ‘What you did is what you said last week, based off the way you came out of camp. You have a chance to be really good. You got really good players that really fit well together.’ Now, we got to do a lot of things in order to keep winning, but that’s exciting. They should be excited about that. I told them get ready to go back to work tomorrow, and we got to improve. We asked them a lot to sacrifice to play here, an investment, how we do things here and how we work. I was glad it paid off for them in the first place, so they could see it.”
What was going through your mind walking down Victory Hill through that crowd?
“Felt like I was back at Mardi Gras. It was pretty awesome. It was pretty electric, and I actually felt bad that there were so many people. Most people were so far away they couldn’t even really get close to the players, but it was awesome. I think the whole day was really neat. How electric the campus was, from what people said, and that’s what LSU is supposed to be. That’s why we’re here. I’m not making huge statements. It’s one game, but I’m just saying that’s the LSU swagger. That’s the energy. That’s how the stadium is supposed to be, hard to come in and play, hard to play on offenses, especially quarterbacks. I think it started there, and it started seeing their energy there. This may not make a lot of sense: I commend the fans a lot because you could have left. You have this big delay, you’ve been up all day, and all of a sudden you don’t know how long the delay is going to be, and it’s raining, and there’s lightning, and you could leave. We came out to an electric atmosphere, and so that was really cool to see, and I appreciate that a lot.”
Sometimes it seems like you and your teams almost feed off of drama. Why do you think that is?
“I don’t know. I don’t even say it arrogantly because we played well again, but we had drama last year halfway through the year. We were going to take all these jobs and all this stuff, and there’s no way your team can be focused unless you announce, and we went undefeated through that. I think it’s overrated. I’m not saying I do a great job of controlling it. I just think it’s overrated. Those kids, they play, they prepare, and it’s a lot of stuff we talk about as a coach and the media every day, and they don’t have to do that as much. They had a really, really good camp, really good spring, summer, all those things. One week of some stories about maybe you’re gonna have these two other players or whatever it is. I don’t think that that does anything over there, and I’m glad we played well because that story would have been the whole story. But it really doesn’t matter if your team thinks the right way, understands, and you explain to them. Explain at the beginning, ‘What do you want to do? You have a chance to add a couple players. You want to have them?’ They said, ‘yeah.’ They’re not distracted by it because it’s what they want. If they don’t let us play with them, they don’t let us.”
What did quarterback Sam Leavitt’s ability do for you tonight and for your offense altogether?
“It’s great when your quarterback can move around. The game’s played out of rhythm a lot. The game is not in rhythm all the time as a quarterback, and one of the biggest things with quarterbacks is how do you play when it’s out of rhythm because you don’t block everybody right, and receivers get covered. Sam plays really well, and if you look at his analytics, he’s done really well out of rhythm, gets outside of the pocket moving around. And he showed that today.”
Sam Leavitt’s foot, legs, arm, savvy are all there and then some:https://t.co/LJUIngP7s9
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) September 6, 2026
What could be the future for the guys that you alluded to in that halftime comment about having pros on the roster?
“I just said that to Shelly afterwards, ‘What would it look like if they let us have those players too?’ That’s just my personality, so it is what it is. And then I said, ‘did you actually put that on your show?’ And she said ‘Yes. Well, what’s the difference? Everybody hates you. They can’t hate you that much more.’ I’m just really glad they played the way they did, so that wouldn’t have been the story, because I get it, it would have been the whole story. Even if we won close, kind of ugly, the whole story would have been, man, I screwed the team up by doing this. I said it this morning, you can not agree with it. I’ve been criticized heavily for the last two weeks, and I get that. But my job is not to please you and worry about what you’re going to write. My job is what I believe is right, and I believe we were fighting for what was right for those kids. I’m not going to get into all the reasons, but that’s what I believe. And so, many people don’t like that, but they don’t understand that, and maybe if they knew my relationship with Dae’Quan, they’d think a little differently.”
What do you think is right moving forward? Is it still worth pushing for it?
“I’m not getting into it. This night was awesome for our fans, and that shouldn’t be the storyline. So I appreciate the question, but these guys played really well. The assistant coaches, that’s a really good game plan that they did through all that, and I go back, like I’ve said, Charlie Weis does an amazing job. I’m not gonna make this statement off of one game. We’ve known for a long time. That helmet communication has gone in, there’s no better numbers, yardage, points than anybody in the country. He did it again today, and that’s it. That’s a big thing for me because then when I do have to spend some time on this stuff that we create, it’s a lot easier when you don’t have to go call all the plays and run all offensive meetings, so these guys did a great job.”
Were you all surprised by the defensive pursuit that you guys had, and is this a rat poison type of situation now?
“I was not this positive with them in there as I am with you guys, but I told them, ‘Hey, the backups on defense did not perform to our standard, and they let them go down and score. We turned the ball over early to give them the three points. There’s going to come games that those guys got to go into games, and they’re going to have to stop them. One player is going to be in there as a backup, and they got to stop them to make a critical stop to win the game. So you can’t think differently. I spend a lot more time with them on that because now they’re going to walk out of there, everybody’s going to tell me how great they are, and you guys are going to move them way up in some rankings and all that off of one game. I’m sure that happened last year, and that don’t mean anything. They got to go back and work and improve each week.”
What did you see out of Jordan Ross?
“Really great, we have some unique players that we brought here with our ends that can really drop and do different things. Then Whit (Weeks) and TJ (Dottery) are really good inside blitzers, so it allows you to run a lot of different defenses that these guys can drop. We can bring interior pressure with Whit and TJ, and we saw some of that today which I think rattled the quarterback. Once we kind of got it going, it was like, let’s keep the heat inside, but give them different looks because that’s a hard situation for any quarterback to play in. I’ve been on the other side. You have to go in there and play, especially the way the other side was going. We’ve got to make plays, so really good job by Jordan doing multiple things.”
How are you guys able to have synergy in the run game with only really three returning starters?
“We’ve got bigger tests that are going to come up. I think Dabo (Swinney) does an amazing job. The strength of that defense is not the defensive tackles, and so in this conference, we’re going to play some bigger tests in there. We’re going to start to continue to improve, but the guys played well together, seemed to move well together. You didn’t have a lot of negative plays, which is really critical to not be behind the sticks. I thought those guys did well.”
What can you share about the game plan against the Clemson QBs?
“I just think our defensive staff did a good job. The game evolves during the game. I think that’s what all coaches do, and so, once you could feel right away the way we were playing on offense, I felt that on offense, even though we screwed up the first drive, once it got going, this feels really good over here. We’re running; we’re throwing; we’re not getting much pressure; we’re going to play well over here. We had played well so early. It was like, okay, let’s just not let the ball go over our head. Let’s play back here and keep it in front of us, and just kind of give them some pressure inside of the quarterback. That’s hard when it starts going like that. You got no running game, no yards rushing. When you play quarterback and you can’t make any yards rushing that makes the game really hard because obviously the goal is to try to make them one-dimensional, and obviously the goal is, after that, to make them zero-dimensional. That’s what happened.”
Is Leavitt’s tendency to seek out contact rather than go down part of why you wanted him to come be your quarterback?
“Sam’s got kind of like a defensive mindset when he runs the ball, like Jackson Dart had. Sometimes we got to coach them out of it. Today, I felt like we were going to need things just to get going. The last thing we wanted to do was start slow today. Obviously, all this other stuff, let’s make sure, and so as we go we may talk about sliding in different areas and stuff, but that guy wasn’t going to slide today. As much as I tried for these guys to not have a lot of emotion and waste energy and I think they did a really good job in the delay, which I told them, ‘This is perfect. Let it delay as long as you can because you’re in your home locker room. You’re used to this. That locker room sucks over there.’ The longer you sit in there, that’s a real thing. Even when they said, ‘Hey, you want to shorten the 90 minutes when we come back, no, leave it all there. We’ll go out at midnight.’ If you haven’t figured out my competitiveness in order to win, if I’m gonna go through all that other stuff for two players, nationally. If I think 90 minutes is gonna help us win the game, we’re gonna sit in the locker room for 90 minutes.”
How did the environment impact your team tonight?
“It’s great to be on this side. I’ve been over there a lot — three at last place, two at Alabama, the overtime game at Alabama, the overtime game here a couple years ago — I’ve been over there when it’s been really intense, and I was glad to be on this side. I’ve seen that it is hard to keep the players down. That crowd starts going with the warm-ups and songs and energy. I found myself not doing a really good job being real calm. It was pretty awesome, really cool. If you’ve only been on that side of something, and you’re always like, ‘What would that be like?’ Maybe you drive by a house somewhere, you think, ‘Man, that’d be pretty cool to live over there.'”
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