GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
ATLANTA – It’s a bit of a surprise that LSU coach Brian Kelly didn’t rent a car or have the LSU plane take him and his three players with him here on a quick trip to Clemson, South Carolina, after their SEC Media Days duties.
It’s just two hours northeast by car on Interstate 85, and that’s where the Tigers open the 2025 season on Saturday, Aug. 30 (7:30 p.m. eastern, ABC). Considering how much LSU has pointed to this game all summer, why not a quick look-see in person for Kelly, quarterback Garrett Nussmeier, wide receiver Chris Hilton Jr. and linebacker Whit Weeks?
The Tigers have been wearing “Beat Clemson” shirts. There are signs in the weight room and throughout the facility. And, refreshingly, there have been none of the, “It’s no bigger than any other game on the schedule,” comments.
“We’re 0-3 in openers at LSU under my watch,” Kelly said in the main press conference room Monday at The Omni Hotel. “We needed to do some things differently this year. That is embrace this opener. Embracing it in a manner that this IS a big game. It’s a tangible goal for our football team to want to be 1-0.”
In losing to Florida State in 2022, 24-23, in the Superdome, the Seminoles again, 45-24, in Orlando, and 27-20 to USC in Las Vegas last year, LSU looked flat and flat unprepared through much of all three games.
“There’s not a, ‘Let’s warm up into the season,'” Kelly said this time around. “We want to be ready for this football game. So we’re doing everything in our power to give our players the opportunity for that success.”
Nussmeier, who can throw out non-answers and cliches as well as pinpoint passes, is not trying to say the past is the past and has nothing to do with this team. LSU actually has lost five openers in a row in all with the last win to start a season on Aug. 31, 2019 – 55-3 over Georgia Southern. LSU went on to beat Clemson, 42-25, on Jan. 13, 2020, in the Superdome to win the national championship and finish 15-0.
“There’s no hiding from the turnovers.”
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) July 14, 2025
– Garrett Nussmeier on making 2025 better than 2024:https://t.co/mZVAoo48wL
“I think there’s been an emphasis for us as a team – a total switch of mindset to go 1-0 and to focus on that,” Nussmeier said. “There’s no hiding from the fact we’ve lost the last five openers. That’s something that we’ve acknowledged and we’ve accepted. And I think we’ve changed the way we think in order to make that correction.”
And what a way for Nussmeier to open his Heisman Trophy campaign and start LSU on its way to the College Football Playoff for the first time since beating Oklahoma in the Peach Bowl in the CFP semifinal on Dec. 28, 2019 – than with a win.
“I’d say it’s more of a welcoming of that opportunity to be able to go into a place like Clemson in prime-time television and just put it all out there,” Nussmeier said.
“It’s exciting,” Weeks said. “I want to play the best teams every week, because those are the fun games to play in – 7:30 p.m., ABC. Those are the games you live for. That’s why I play football to play in environments like that, play against teams like that. My motto is in order to be the best you’ve got to beat the best.”
Microphones like @LSUfootball LB Whit Weeks, and he tackles them with passion:https://t.co/lTn1pQS0XV
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) July 17, 2025
Clemson is likely to be ranked higher than LSU going into the game as it finished 10-3 overall in the regular season and 7-1 in the Atlantic Coast Conference last season before winning the ACC title game over SMU. Clemson also reached the playoffs, but lost to Texas. LSU finished 9-4 overall with a win over Baylor in the third-tier Texas Bowl and was 5-3 in the SEC.
The game will match two of the brightest stars in the country in senior quarterbacks Nussmeier and Clemson’s Cade Klubnik. The two teams have never played in the regular season. LSU leads the series 3-1 with a 7-0 Sugar Bowl win on Jan. 1, 1959, to wrap up the Tigers’ first national championship season, a 10-7 win in the Peach Bowl in 1996 before the 2019-20 national title win. Clemson and coach Dabo Swinney beat LSU, 25-24, in the Peach Bowl on Dec. 31, 2012.
Swinney is about to enter his 17th full season at Clemson and has won two national championships (2016 and ’18 seasons) and reached two others.
“We’re going to go out there week one against Clemson, and that’s what you want,” Weeks said. “You want to go play a good team you don’t want to lollygag into the season. You want to get into a fistfight the first week.”
LSU has landed few punches in those last five opening losses.
“We know what our past records have been in opening games,” Weeks said. “Every day we go into work to change that narrative. Everybody in the whole building knows what the goals are for this season. And Clemson’s just the first team that we have to beat in order to achieve those goals.”
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