Brian Kelly’s Dig at Arkansas Doesn’t Hold Up Against Basic Fact Check

Brian Kelly

In the afterglow of LSU’s 24-point win over Arkansas, Brian Kelly is preaching the gospel of consistency.

His No. 8 Tigers have a showdown with No. 14 Texas A&M coming up on Saturday and, by golly, the LSU football coach is going to use this week as a pulpit from which to preach his A+ coaching philosophy.

Kelly’s become quite wise in so many decades of head coaching and getting 35% of a legit Southern accent accomplished, after all. On the Paul Finebaum Show on Monday, he let the world know.

“Over my 34 years of being a head coach, my process has been successful,” Kelly said.

He explained players crave a steady drumbeat coming from their leaders.

“They want something that’s consistent day in and day out, and they don’t want any BS,” said Kelly, who once did this:

“They don’t want you to tell ’em a story — be straight with ’em, be upfront, be transparent, and be consistent.”

Sage as this 62-year-old Massachusetts native is, Kelly lives this core tenet through and through. At least two times since LSU’s defeat of Arkansas, Kelly has decided that it’s best to take passive-aggressive shots at other programs without the benefit of actual facts backing them up. Twice, when it came to sideswipes at the Arkansas football team, he could have spoken from a place of knowledge. Twice, he failed.

Consistency indeed.

Let’s examine the evidence:

Brian Kelly Can’t Help Himself When It Comes to Hogs

On Saturday night, Kelly had the opportunity to walk away from his post-game press conference in Fayetteville without ruffling any feathers.

Instead, he decided to take the low road and act like somehow LSU football had been disrespected by Arkansas scheduling the Tigers for homecoming. Kelly, in this case, had conveniently forgotten that modern SEC programs prioritize what TV broadcasters want in order to maximize revenue for all conference members when it comes to scheduling.

If that means an elite program has to be scheduled for homecoming, so be it. Everybody still wins financially, including Kelly – who pocketed a $500,000 bonus for winning on Saturday as part of his 10-year, $95 million contract.

On top of that, he also complained that Texas A&M would likely schedule its homecoming day for the Tigers come Saturday. Brian, Brian, Brian. When are you going to learn? The Aggies don’t even do homecoming.

Kelly, steady as she blows, stuck to script during his press conference on Monday.

This time he decided to take a dig at South Carolina and Arkansas football fans. The opportunity presented itself as he praised some of the SEC’s largest stadia, such as Texas A&M’s Kyle Field, for presenting a challenge beyond what the smaller guys can deliver.

“There’s a few that are separating themselves from the others. No knock on South Carolina, no knock on Arkansas. Those are tough environments,” said Kelly, perhaps failing to realize he was indeed insulting the Gamecocks and Razorbacks alike.

“But when you start to separate with maybe Neyland Stadium [Tennessee], and going to Alabama, and certainly here with A&M and Tiger Stadium, these are different. And you have to prepare and understand that in that environment you have to block out those distractions because if you don’t, they will affect the outcome of certain games.”

Look, nobody is going to argue that the most lucrative SEC football programs also happen to have the largest fanbases and stadia. LSU, Alabama, Texas A&M and Alabama can all tout home crowds of more than 100,000. Meanwhile, the capacities for South Carolina and Arkansas stand at 77,559 and 76,000, respectively.

LSU Football Misfiring on the Road?

That much is patently obvious. Where Kelly goes off track is acting as if the sheer intensity of Arkansas’ home crowd – the fourth-largest in program history – didn’t affect his team on Saturday night.

LSU racked up 8 false start/snap infractions against Arkansas, which is a penalty directly tied to the volume of the crowd’s cheers.

That’s much more than LSU has suffered under Kelly at some of the other large venues around the SEC, as Andrew Hutchinson’s research bears out:

2022 at Texas A&M (LSU committed 1 false start/snap infraction)

2022 at Florida (LSU committed 2 such penalties)

2023 at Alabama (LSU committed 5 such penalties including 3 illegal snaps/snap infractions)

Clearly, LSU had some trouble with Arkansas’ home crowd. In terms of this one type of penalty, they had more trouble against the Hogs than at the bigger schools.

In this case, yes, LSU absolutely overcame these violations on its way to an impressive win. That was not the case last season at Alabama.

Brian Kelly has every right to praise bigger venues for their bigger crowds. But his casual dismissal of what exactly happened on Saturday night indicates it’d be nice if he could see the bigger picture, too.

Of course, that would mean getting all the facts straight.

Which, it turns out, isn’t exactly on brand for Brian.

Sam Pittman: Mike Anderson as Heath: Bielema?

Now, for some Arkansas football deep diving.

On Monday night, Razorback broadcaster Mike Irwin made some interesting comparisons between recent Razorback basketball and football coaches.

He started by comparing Stan Heath to Bret Bielema since both head coaches had found great success at previous stops (Heath at Kent State and Bielema at Wisconsin) Both ended up tanking, though.

“So we get rid of him. And then what do we get? We get John Pelphrey, who is the basketball version of Chad Morris, and then everything goes boom and crashes. So then what do they do? They get Mike Anderson,” Irwin said. “He stabilized the program. He didn’t get ’em doing what the fans wanted, but he stopped the bleeding and started it slowly back up a little bit…. He paved the way for Eric Musselman.”

I think that’s what’s going on with [Sam] Pittman right now. I think he’s trying to stabilize the program, build it back up some so when they replace him, the next guy is not starting at the bottom. I think that’s exactly what he’s doing and I applaud him for that.”

“And I wish you people would shut up because you need to know what’s going on over there right now. I don’t know if he’s gone after this year. It may be another year before that happens, but eventually he’s going to step aside and he wants to leave the program in better shape just like Mike Anderson did for the next guy who then can come in and take it to the next level.”

The above, plus more on LSU football, starting at 1:15 here:

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