A team cannot improve over the course of a season and then win a college football national championship. That is not completely right. The best teams always change a bit and come together throughout the year. But there is some truth to that point. The margin of error when your grail is a national title has historically ranged from zero to one loss, with only sporadic exceptions. Losing a game in September? Depending on who you are and what’s happening around you throughout the season, you could be out right then. Lose twice by mid-October? You can still go ahead and have a fun season, but you won’t be playing for the biggest prize. This limitation is a feature of the sport. A baseball team can be 22-29 in June and then do the World Series. College football works differently.
At least it worked differently. Things will change when the College Football Playoffs expand from four teams to 12 in 2024 or 25. In a way, it will devalue the regular season that a team can lose a game, any game, and retain a title path. In another sense, there will be more emphasis on more regular season games as more teams spend more of the season battling for the title, at least nominally. It would be best if everyone around the sport could learn to love the regular season on their own terms again. But that toothpaste is way out of the tube, and at this point the way to add more meaning to more games is to get more teams into the CFP.
This year’s LSU Tigers are a window into the direction of college football. In 2019, LSU had the scariest offense and arguably the best team ever, with the 15-0 record to illustrate its case. After that, the program quickly lost its way, and in mid-2021 it fired Ed Orgeron, the head coach and Cajun son who brought that title to Baton Rouge in 2019. It seemed possible that LSU was due in the wilderness for several years. But 10 weeks into the next year, under a new coach, the Tigers are closer to the penthouse than the annex. On Saturday night, they beat blood rivals Alabama with a two-point conversion in overtime, effectively beating the Crimson Tide out of the playoffs and staying alive (and atop the SEC West race) despite two previous losses. They still control their own destiny, even in a four-team postseason format. And there will be more teams like her in the future, ones that looked pretty bad at times, but revived over time to become more than feel-good stories.
LSU is a team of the future, not just because they made themselves nationally relevant after a rocky start, but because they’re built. In a way, LSU is less a program for this moment than for the next.
If there’s a word here that describes college football, it’s big. The players are big. The stadiums are big. (Tiger Stadium’s capacity is 102,000.) The television deals are very, very large. And thanks to all that size and the fact that schools don’t pay players, the contracts for coaches are very, very, very large.
Being led not only by a good coach but also by a name is now an absolute requirement for a program like LSU. A coach with a name brings a pedigree that helps with recruitment and fundraising. A trainer with a name brings a seal of approval worthy of a name-branded school, and that seal of approval is currency. To that end, in 2017, Texas A&M athletic director Scott Woodward awarded what was then the largest guaranteed contract in college football history: 10 years and $75 million for titular Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher. Woodward transferred to LSU a few years later, fired Orgeron when things went bad, and then went in search of another name. Woodward looked at a number of coaches — Fisher, of course, but also Michigan State’s Mel Tucker and depending on what reports and denials you believe, Oklahoma’s Lincoln Riley (who is now USC’s Lincoln Riley). They chose Brian Kelly, Notre Dame’s longtime coach.
If someone were to write a screenplay about a college football coach, they could use Kelly as a reference. He has an authoritarian, sometimes purple tinge about him. Two separate events during Kelly’s Notre Dame tenure could have ended a coaching career. One concerned a student assistant who died while filming an exercise in bad weather. (It was Kelly’s decision to practice outside, and an Indiana regulator found Notre Dame to be institutionally at fault.) Another concerned an allegation of sexual assault against a player, whom the accuser’s father claimed Notre Dame had remained silent and only superficially examined. (The accuser died by suicide. Kelly defended how he and the school handled the matter.) Kelly’s career progression was unaffected by either case, as Kelly was, and remains, an exceptionally good football coach. He was a two-time Division II national champion, then winning in Central Michigan and Cincinnati before making regular, albeit underdog, presence for Notre Dame in the Bowl Championship Series and its successor, the College Football Playoffs. So Kelly is both a successful coach and the kind of coach you hire to show how great you are, much like USC that hires Riley or Miami that hires Mario Cristobal.
The future of elite collegiate football is an ongoing arms race between head coaches. By hiring Kelly, Woodward ensured that LSU had one of the greatest guns. The Tigers paid Kelly a small mint even though he was the polar opposite of what most people would consider “culturally fit.” Kelly is a New Englander who came to Baton Rouge after a long stint in one of the country’s most reputable, upstanding institutions. He entered LSU’s boisterous, jambalaya-fueled tailgate culture, where fans are vocal and proud of Louisians. Kelly isn’t one of those things, and it was amusing to fake a Southern accent when he was hired. But when LSU got off to a 7-2 start and defeated Alabama, he demonstrated a point about what truly is “fit.” It’s not so much that fit doesn’t matter. All politics is local and all football coaches are politicians. But there are different elements of the “culture,” and one of LSU’s is a love of hitting Alabama. Kelly wins, so it doesn’t matter if he can make a good bowl of gumbo. That he’s done so well this year (like Riley did at USC after coming from Oklahoma) will only fuel more poaching for highly paid Blockbuster coaches in the future. The fact that Cristobal has been struggling in Miami and that Fisher’s contract at A&M is on the brink of disaster is unlikely to slow things down. It’s a shootout again.
Kelly’s signing of a 10-year, $100 million contract is a sign of the times. Such is his roster build in this, his first year at the helm of the Tigers. LSU will always have four and five star players, even when times are bad. Such is life as a blue-blooded recruit school. But the Tigers had big problems coming to the end of Orgeron’s tenure in 2021, and those are difficult to resolve quickly with players fresh out of high school. So Kelly’s staff worked on the transfer portal. Quarterback Jayden Daniels came from Arizona State who wanted to fire his head coach Herm Edwards for foul play and an NCAA investigation. Defense has benefited tremendously from two Mekhi who played elsewhere last year: safety Mekhi Garner (Louisiana) and tackle Mekhi Wingo (Missouri). Cornerback Jarrick Bernard-Converse, who intercepted Heisman winner Bryce Young in the end zone on Saturday, came from Oklahoma State. This is just a small sample. Wingo got a cue ball in the Alabama win, as did Tigers punter Jay Bramblett, whom Kelly brought from South Bend. Add in some critical newcomers like bookend offensive tackles Emery Jones and Will Campbell, linebacker Harold Perkins and tight end Mason Taylor, who was a big star himself on Saturday, and LSU quickly got a war machine up and running.
With this newly frozen roster playing for a newly frozen coaching staff, it’s perhaps no surprise that LSU started the year looking so iffy. They lost to Florida State in Week 1. They should have won, and would have, were it not for numerous special teams disasters, the most devastating of which was a botched protection that resulted in a blocked extra point to seal the loss of a point. A subsequent loss to Tennessee was a fuller ass kick that looked even worse than it was due to LSU’s turnover problems that began at the inaugural start. Most of the time, however, LSU hasn’t looked so sloppy. Elsewhere there was enough chaos that, by staying the course and getting better, LSU found itself with a non-zero national championship shot as the season entered its most dramatic weeks.
What lies in LSU’s immediate future is hard to say. It’s almost mid-November and they’re on the other side of their annual slugfest in Bama with just two losses. A win would mean winning the SEC, and LSU would then become the first playoff team to lose two and possibly the only one before the format changes from four to 12. The three remaining regular season games are all against teams that LSU should beat (Arkansas, UAB and Fisher’s A&M). Most likely, LSU will win SEC West and then be the food for Georgia, which is currently the far-off No. 1 in esports. But you never know, and LSU’s most magical seasons have led to sneaking up on people for a bit. For example, in 2007, her team lost twice and needed a world-historical mess to make the title game, which they then won.
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In the coming years there will be even more. Teams will continue to throw huge piles of money at coaches who look good in press releases, and some of those coaches, like Kelly, will actually turn out to be pretty good. These coaches are increasingly expected to win fast, regardless of how their teams have fared in the years leading up to their arrival. The appeal of the transfer portal and a more accessible 12-team playoff will be fuel on an expectant fire. And if teams make a couple of mistakes, like LSU did this fall, they’re expected to persevere when there’s theoretically still so much up for grabs. The next chapter for LSU 2022 is unknown, but the next chapter for college football that will be capitalized is more teams like LSU 2022.