Coach Brian Kelly has the LSU football program on the right track. Today we will discuss the 2024 schedule and how it plays well into the new landscape of college football.
When Kelly was named the head coach at LSU in November 2021, he knew it would be a challenge worth tackling to rebuild a program that had fallen so far so fast after the 2019 championship season, a campaign many analysts are still calling the greatest of all time.
It would be more than just the typical growing pains any program goes through with a new head coach. Kelly would have to do a total overhaul of not only the staff and roster, but also the culture in the locker room and beyond.
Scott McKay spoke to this issue immediately upon Kelly’s hiring. He also spoke to the home run nature of LSU AD Scott Woodward’s choice, saying everything that needed to happen would happen in time:
You land a coach like this and you watch him mold your program to what he wants it to be. And for the most part the people around him will be ecstatic to have his direction. Those who aren’t are probably the people who caused your problems in the first place.
LSU’s team culture is terrible. It wasn’t all that good even in 2019 when the Tigers had that magical national championship season. LSU has more players suspended for stupid things like failing drug tests than any program anybody’s ever seen. Those things are evidence of a bad culture. So you need a hard-ass like Brian Kelly to raise the standard, and that probably means squeezing out some people who can’t uphold that standard.
In three years this program won’t look like it does now, and that’s a good thing.
Well, we are two years into it, and McKay is correct–it looks nothing like it did when Ed Orgeron left and LSU went to Houston with 39 scholarship players to get drummed by Kansas State 42-20 in the 2022 Texas Bowl.
And the term limit of McKay’s analysis will be upon us in the not so distant future. Kelly is entering year three at the helm, and it will indeed be a pivotal year for a lot of programs across the college football landscape, LSU being just one of them.
Over and done with is the four-team college playoff format that lasted ten years (hard to believe the BCS’s final year was 2013 when Alabama annihilated Kelly’s former team Notre Dame). LSU made it to the playoff only one time, and of course brought home the hardware. Next season the playoff expands to 12 schools, which means there will be two- and three-loss teams in the mix, a reality that college football got extremely lucky with considering the Big 10, Big 12, ACC, and SEC are all moving to a 16- or 17-team super-league, which in turn will typically mean more difficult schedules. Had the playoff stayed at four teams with these more difficult schedules in play, you could have expected even more controversy than you had in 2023 and 2014 when Florida State and TCU, respectively, were left out of the playoff.
On top of LSU’s SEC schedule that includes home games against Ole Miss, Alabama, and Oklahoma, the Tigers will also be battling new Big 10 arrivals USC and UCLA. Of course there are other tricky teams on the slate, as road trips to South Carolina, Florida, Arkansas, and Texas A&M will demand a lot of a team still building.
Here is LSU’s schedule for 2024.
- vs. USC (Vegas Kickoff Classic)
Sunday, September 1, 6:30 pm CT - vs. Nicholls
Saturday, September 7 - at South Carolina
Saturday, September 14 - vs. UCLA
Saturday, September 21 - vs. South Alabama
Saturday, September 28 - vs. Ole Miss
Saturday, October 12 - at Arkansas
Saturday, October 19 - at Texas A&M
Saturday, October 26 - vs. Alabama
Saturday, November 9 - at Florida
Saturday, November 16 - vs. Vanderbilt
Saturday, November 23 - vs. Oklahoma
Saturday, November 30
Given the state of the program, and as a conservative estimate, there could be 10 wins on that schedule, which is a credit to Kelly for having the awareness (and humility) to stabilize the program with veteran players from the portal as well as with incoming high school talent. The cupboard isn’t yet fully stacked, though, despite a top-10 recruiting class coming in and some absolutely stellar new hires on the defensive side of the ball, so a conservative estimate of ten wins also means two losses.
That is being very conservative, I believe, so any Tiger fan saying that Kelly should go undefeated since it’s his third year–the same as Orgeron’s national championship season–should probably pump the brakes a bit. Too often fans forget key contrasts between seasons, and one of the most significant contrasts in college football history is on the horizon with the new 16-team SEC.
There will be no more SEC East and West divisions, so two conference losses might or might not put the Tigers in the top two playing in the conference title game. Depends on who they lose to. Also, after this initial stop-gap year where each team plays eight conference games, it is possible that the league will move to a nine-game league slate, which makes much more sense as it would mean teams actually meeting at least once every few years.
But this is where the biggest difference lies, a difference that will give programs and fans alike reason to celebrate. Going into the season, for the first time, teams will know they don’t have to win their league in order to have a postseason shot at a title. With losses to say, USC and an Arkansas or Alabama, a 10-2 LSU team would likely qualify for the playoff, barring some atypical scenario where you have a more than usual number of the top 12 teams with one loss or have an upset or two in conference championship games. This has simply not been the case that often, and even in those scenarios, given LSU’s accumulated pedigree with three national titles and a runner-up finish (should have been a fourth!), the Tigers are in great shape in terms of reputation and how a committee might decide. Here are the rankings from Nos. 9-12 in the final CFP poll since its inception.
9. Missouri 10-2
10. Penn State 10-2
11. Ole Miss 10-2
12. Oklahoma 10-2
Kansas State (10-3) *upset win over playoff-bound No. 3 TCU
USC (11-2) *likely playoff bound without upset loss to No. 8 Utah (10-3) in the Pac-12 championship
Penn State (10-2)
Washington (10-2)
Oklahoma State (11-2)
Michigan State (10-2)
Utah (10-3) *Pac-12 champions
Pittsburgh (11-2)
Covid year. All teams played a wildly different number of games. Ohio State made it in at No. 3 with a 6-0 record, for instance. This season has no bearing on my analysis.
Florida (10-2)
Penn State (10-2)
Utah (11-2)
Auburn (9-3) *beat No. 13 Alabama (10-2)
Washington (10-3)
Florida (9-3)
LSU (9-3)
Penn State (9-3)
Penn State (10-2)
Miami (10-2)
Washington (10-2)
Central Florida (13-0) *Group of 5 undefeated conference champion
USC (9-3)
Colorado (10-3)
Florida State (9-3)
Oklahoma State (9-3)
Florida State (10-2)
North Carolina (11-2)
TCU (10-2)
Ole Miss (9-3)
Ole Miss (9-3)
Arizona (10-3)
Kansas State (9-3)
Georgia Tech (10-3)
It is clear that a 10-2 LSU team likely makes it into the top 12 in most of those seasons.
According to this trend and of course not having any new data from what records will be once conference realignment bears its results, LSU is in great shape. If the ball bounces a particular way, even a 9-3 team could sneak in some years, and 9-3 is considered mediocre by many among the fanbase. Given these statistics, along with two 10-win seasons under Kelly, confidence should be high among Tiger fans that meaningful football will be played in late December of this calendar year. And with the talent Kelly is accumulating, which will be the focus of Part II of this article, it is not out of the question that LSU may not miss the playoffs again for a very long time.
Jeff LeJeune is the author of several books, writer for RVIVR, editor, master of English and avid historian, teacher and tutor, aspiring ghostwriter and podcaster, and creator of LeJeune Said. Visit his website at jefflejeune.com, where you can find a conglomerate of content.
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