Earlier today, what we expected would happen happened – four members of LSU Football’s defensive coaching staff got the axe…

LSU football coach Brian Kelly fired the team’s defensive coordinator and three other members of his staff Wednesday. The Tigers finished the 2023 season with a 10-3 mark, but their successes behind Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels were offset by a porous defense that gave up 416 yards and 28 points per game.

Matt House was in his second year as LSU’s defensive coordinator, serving in the role during both years of Kelly’s tenure. Also fired Wednesday were defensive line coach Jimmy Lindsey, safeties coach Kerry Cooks and cornerbacks coach Robert Steeples.

While LSU had once been known as “DBU” for its ability to produce noted defensive backs, of late the Tigers’ defense has taken the rap as being undependable. Most recently, it gave up a number of big plays to Wisconsin in Monday’s Reliaquest Bowl in Tampa, Florida. A last stand, with three sacks, won the game for the Tigers.

LSU released a statement from Kelly last Wednesday morning saying the coach would move on with a new staff in 2024.

“This morning, I met with Matt House, Kerry Cooks, Robert Steeples, and Jimmy Lindsey to inform them that they would not return to our coaching staff in 2024,” Kelly said. “I want to thank each of these coaches for their work on behalf of our football program and our institution during their time here.

“Decisions like these are always difficult, and we do not make them lightly, but they are made with the best interests of our program and our student-athletes in mind. Moving forward, we will continue working to build a championship caliber coaching staff in support of our mission to Graduate Champions.”

The two members of the defensive coaching staff who weren’t fired were John Jancek, who started out as the team’s special teams coach and outside linebackers coach, and then was pressed into duty as the defensive line coach when Lindsey was forced to spend pretty much the whole season on medical leave following an undisclosed illness, and Bob Diaco, who went from an analyst position to Jancek’s job as outside linebackers and special teams.

There is talk that Diaco, who in the past was the defensive coordinator on a few highly successful Notre Dame teams under Kelly and was a Broyles Award finalist before eventually getting a head coaching job at Connecticut (he’s also been defensive coordinator at Louisiana Tech and Purdue), might get consideration for Matt House’s job. What’s more likely is Diaco will stay in the special teams role. Jancek might go back to being an analyst, or he might coach outside linebackers; it’s going to depend on what other coaches LSU hires.

As to that, there are four names being bandied about most often. Whether the four would constitute a replacement defensive staff is entirely subject to speculation.

First, Missouri defensive coordinator Blake Baker has been probably the most prominent name thrown out as House’s replacement. Baker coached linebackers at LSU in 2021, Ed Orgeron’s last year, and he’s remembered as a very popular, high-energy coach who did some pretty amazing work in transforming Damone Clark and Micah Baskerville into top-grade SEC linebackers on a defense that began the season horribly but made significant improvement throughout the year. Baker, whose wife played soccer at LSU and hails from St. Tammany Parish, transformed Missouri’s defense from 113th in total yards allowed per game to the top 25, keying the team’s 11-2 season in 2023.

He’s been a defensive coordinator at two other stops – Louisiana Tech (2015-18) and Miami (2019-20), with somewhat mixed results.

But Baker’s Missouri defense, which featured a bunch of mostly-middling recruits, was athletic, physical and aggressive. They gave up just 20.9 points and 335.8 yards per game, numbers which in today’s college game are very solid (had LSU managed those numbers they would have been no worse than 11-1 in the regular season, they’d have won the SEC West and they’d have quite possibly made it to the playoffs), and most appetizing of all were the 39 sacks they racked up.

Baker isn’t a lock. In fact, he just signed a new contract with a raise and an extension at Mizzou. But considering that House was making $1.9 million (Baker is reportedly in the $1.1 million range). It would be expensive to extricate Baker from his current job, but there is word that Kelly will make him say no because LSU has got to become a more high-energy, aggressive defense and that’s what Baker brings.

Which, again, is not to say Baker is a lock.

Two other names being bandied about are also familiar.

Longtime LSU secondary coach Corey Raymond, whose name is intertwined with the LSU moniker of “DBU” given the plethora of superstar defensive backs plying their college trade in Baton Rouge in the last decade, like Baker wasn’t retained when Kelly took the job in December of 2021. Raymond left for Florida, but he only lasted two years on Billy Napier’s staff there and is now on the market. Raymond’s past success at LSU makes him an attractive candidate to return, and there have reportedly been discussions about bringing him back. Negatives on Raymond, though, are that LSU’s secondary play trailed off badly in his last two years here and Florida’s secondary has been dreadful the last two seasons – which makes for worries that the magic might be gone.

If Raymond would be something of a reclamation project, Bo Davis would be the opposite. Davis, like Raymond a former Tiger player and like Raymond a former coach (he was a graduate assistant and then a strength coach), is currently the defensive line coach at Texas where he’s making nearly a million dollars a year. Kelly would have to raise Davis to bring him back to his alma mater, but the job he’s done as a defensive line coach at Texas and in a couple of stops in a similar role at Alabama would indicate he’d be worth every penny.

Another name being thrown around as a potential defensive backs coach is T.J. Rushing, who has held a similar job at Texas A&M since 2020. Rushing was washed out in the changeover in College Station between Jimbo Fisher and Mike Elko; he’s currently on the market. Before Texas A&M, he was at Memphis for two years with then-head coach Mike Norvell, and at Arizona State in 2016-17 before that.

If Baker isn’t the choice for defensive coordinator at LSU then it’s possible North Carolina State DC Tony Gibson might be. Gibson, a 2021 Broyles Award finalist, has been the DC at NC State for four years and they’ve been stout – NC State has been pretty consistent the past three years in giving up only about 19 or 20 points a game, holding opponents under 125 yards per game rushing each season, giving up no more than 330 yards per game and picking off 15, 19 and 17 passes, respectively, in 2021, 2022 and 2023. Before NC State, Gibson was the DC at West Virginia from 2014-18, and he’s also had Power 5 stops at Arizona, Pittsburgh and Michigan. He’d be a home run hire, as would Baker.

As would Jesse Minter, the current Michigan DC. Minter would seem to be a bit of a pipe dream, but he got his start in coaching as a grad assistant for Kelly at Cincinnati.

Texas secondary coach Terry Joseph, a New Orleans native and former grad assistant at LSU in 2006, is another name to keep in mind. Joseph, whose former stops include stints at Louisiana Tech and Tennessee (on the staffs of former LSU assistant Derek Dooley) and then at Nebraska, Texas A&M and North Carolina before he joined Brian Kelly’s Notre Dame staff for three years from 2018-20.

Look for Kelly to move fast – but not that fast.

This weekend will finish the NFL season and there are lots of potential coaching candidates who will come available then. Additionally, particularly in the case of Minter and Michigan defensive line coach Mike Elston, who was a mainstay on Kelly’s Notre Dame staff (though Elston is a Michigan alum), there’s the better part of another week before coaches participating in the national championship game can enter the picture. In Michigan’s case that bears watching, particularly given the rumors that Jim Harbaugh is bound for either the Las Vegas Raiders or Los Angeles Chargers after the season.

Either way, hope springs eternal at LSU following the changeover in coaches. There was clearly something dysfunctional with respect to the defense in 2023, and it wasn’t like Matt House, impressive resume in tow, suddenly forgot how to coach. But the defense never got better, and individual players on the defense more or less unanimously underachieved in personal performance. That was an indication of bad chemistry, something which became unmistakable when a video surfaced of team captain Mekhi Wingo brushing House off during a post-game celebration at the Reliaquest Bowl.

A coaching changeover and a boost in energy and morale alone could be expected to yield improvement.

The good news is LSU, even with Jayden Daniels, Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas heading to the NFL, is still loaded on offense. The defense doesn’t have to be elite. If it’s better than average the Tigers are a national championship contender.

And while LSU didn’t play like a talented defense at all in 2023, for that to be true they’d have to be one of the most overrated units in college football history. We counted 14 former four- or five-star recruits among defensive players projected to return to LSU, plus three such players among the transfers expected to join the program and another seven four-star recruits signed in December. There is zero reason to believe that collection of players can’t produce a defense capable of holding opponents below, say, 25 points and 360 yards per game – which, again, paired with the Tiger offense would be more than enough to compete for a championship.