The legend of Brian Keith Kelly will take shape in the next 120 days. LSU’s football czar, who is the oldest head coach in LSU history, is in the pivotal year of his ten-year contract. Year four is the time of reckoning for Tiger football coaches. It always has been the pivotal moment in the modern era, which began with Paul Franklin Dietzel capturing the national title at 34 in 1958.
Dietzel was three decades younger than the soon to be 64-year-old Kelly, who is in his 35th season as a head coach. BK went 8-4 in 1994 in year four at Grand Valley State. He was 12-0 in year four at Cincinnati in 2009 and was immediately hired by Notre Dame where he was 9-4 in his fourth season at South Bend where NCAA sanctions erased his nine victories in 2013.
Dietzel was the first of three LSU leaders to win championships in year four. Nick Saban did it in 2003 when he was 52 as his 13-1 Tigers beat Oklahoma 21-14 to secure the crystal trophy at the Louisiana Superdome. Fifty-eight-year-old Edward James Orgeron Jr. capped a previously mediocre career with a magical 15-0 championship run in 2019.
Orgeron’s career record was 52-47 in nine seasons removed from 2019, but the greatest season in school history fueled enough mojo to provide him with 17 million reasons not to coach anymore after he turned 60 in 2021.
Kelly has won 313 times on the field (292 wins after NCAA punishment) in his career which began in 1991 during Curley Hallman’s first season in TigerTown. No matter what happens this season, Kelly has a record of accomplishment which rivals most of his peers. He has not won a national crown, and this is the year that it is expected for him to return gold to the bayou.
LSU fans demand that Kelly win the title on Jan. 19 of next year in Miami or face the consequences at season’s end. The fourth season brought crushing closures to once promising careers of Hallman, Mike Archer and Jerry Stovall.
Hallman was dismissed after a 4-7 campaign in 1994; Archer lost his job after going 5-6 in 1990 and Stovall was canned after a 4-7 season in 1983, just ten months removed from being named National Coach of the Year.
It is certain that Kelly will not lose seven games in 2025, but expectations are so extravagant that 8-4 is considered a disastrous outcome. Les Miles won his national title in 2007 in year three, but it was crucial year No. 4 that was his undoing. After posting a 34-6 record in his first three years, Miles dipped to 8-5 in 2008 and was never regarded the same.
The LSU program is among the best in the country and produced a surplus of more than $50 million last year which paid for gymnastics, women’s basketball; track and field and other sports absorbing multi-million-dollar deficits. Kelly is a respectable 29-11 overall and 17-7 in the SEC through three tours of duty in the most rugged conference in the land.
The numbers are respectable, but they do not meet the forecast for a championship by year four or else. Charles McClendon and Gerry DiNardo are the two coaches to make it to year five without winning a national championship, but both men were wounded as they approached their fifth season at LSU.
McClendon inherited a spectacular treasure from Dietzel as Miles did from Saban. Mac went 9-1-1, 7-4, 8-2-1 and 8-3 in his first four seasons. His job was likely saved by the remarkable 14-7 victory over Arkansas in the 1966 Cotton Bowl, snapping the Razorbacks’ 22-game winning streak and depriving Frank Broyles of a second straight NCAA title.
Without the upset in Dallas over the Hogs, LSU would have probably fired McClendon when he posted a 5-4-1 mark in his fifth season at the helm in1966. Mac lasted 18 seasons, most of them good, but few of them spectacular.
When Dietzel defied naysayers and brought glory to Baton Rouge in 1958, the Tigers had not won a title since 1908 when champions were not crowned. The drought was 50 years from 1908 to 1958, and it was another 45 years before Saban conquered the world.
Four years later, Miles was a champ, and in 2019 Orgeron hoisted the trophy for being the nation’s best. LSU fans were spoiled by three titles in 17 seasons. Patrons, who invest much in watching the Tigers seven nights a year, anticipate national recognition at the highest levels, not just a winning season and bowl trip.
Gerry DiNardo appeared on the brink of greatness after three years which produced a 26-9-1 record after LSU had gone 11-22 in the three seasons before his arrival. But DiNardo faltered in year four with a 4-7 debacle and closed his LSU tenure by going 2-8 in 1999. It was curtains for the man who briefly returned the magic to Tiger Stadium when LSU whipped No. 1 Florida 28-21 in 1997.
It is vital for Kelly to win at Clemson on Aug. 30. The Tigers from Louisiana must beat the Tigers from South Carolina on the 122nd anniversary of the birth of Huey Long, or Kelly is facing extinction from the SEC. He will retire a rich man, but his legacy as one of the top mentors of his generation is dependent on the outcome of this season.
Kelly should survive for at least one more season if LSU competes for the championship as the Bengals did in 2011, losing 21-0 in the title game to Alabama. But if the Tigers don’t make the post-season playoffs, look for Scott Woodward to be orchestrating another expensive buyout.
Woodward is taking an appropriate bow for his brilliance in hiring two-time College World Series champion Jay Johnson as baseball coach, but his future is tied to Kelly. If the man from Massachusetts leads his troops to the promised land in Miami, Woodard will be hailed as a genius. If the Tigers slip this season, Woodward may be known as the king of the buyout with Kelly’s parting gift rivaling the going away present that Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher received at College Station.
Much is on the line in the next four months as the opener sets the tone. If LSU whips Clemson, Kelly should win 10 games at a minimum. If LSU loses a sixth consecutive opening date, vultures will rapidly encircle Death Valley, leaving Kelly with precious little room to maneuver his way out of an appointment with a firing squad.
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