Jeff LeJeune has been peppering our readership with LSU football posts of late, so I haven’t done my occasional poking-in lately where the Tigers are concerned. But after yesterday’s 35-31 win over Wisconsin, I thought I’d throw out a few observations about the state of the program and where things are headed.

I’ll start with an observation about the fans.

LSU’s football fans, or at least a strangely large number of them, have descended into a funk of negativity which is difficult to understand. Here’s a 10-3 team which will finish the season ranked somewhere in the top 12 (#11 would be my guess, moving up past Penn State and Oklahoma in the final poll), which starting next year would be a good enough season to earn a spot in the 12-team playoff, and LSU boasts a Heisman Trophy winner in Jayden Daniels, and somehow Brian Kelly has more detractors now than he had before the season started.

It’s very strange.

Going back over the season, LSU’s offense was the best in school history minus one exception – that being the 2019 national championship outfit which boasted a multitude of elite NFL players (Joe Burrow, Justin Jefferson, JaMarr Chase, Clyde Edwards-Helaire). What Daniels did, aided by the amazing seasons Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas put together, in 2023 was nothing short of amazing.

And yet it seems like nobody really even enjoyed it. The grumbling and catastrophe syndrome infecting such a large swath of the fan base seems completely out of proportion to reality.

Even so, I get it.

LSU went 1-3 against Top 10 teams this year. They lost to Florida State (13-1), Ole Miss (11-2) and Alabama (12-2), which were opponents there shouldn’t be much shame in losing to. But the Florida State loss was a major irritant because most LSU fans – not to mention Kelly and LSU’s players – thought the 2022 season-opening loss to Florida State was utterly aberrant and the 2023 team was supposed to remedy that.

And, of course, you can’t lose to Ole Miss if you’re LSU.

Losing to Alabama after he’d beaten them the year before seemed like a step back. This Alabama team, though it ended up making the playoff with an upset of Georgia in the SEC Championship, didn’t seem to be as talented as the one the Tigers knocked off last year.

Those losses were maybe too jarring for the folks to appreciate the wins. And there was the method by which those losses happened – not to mention the method of some of the wins – which played a role in the grumbling. More on that just below.

People forget that Brian Kelly has taken a program which was 11-12 in the two years before his arrival, and he’s now gone 20-7 with that program. They forget how utterly and completely overmatched that poor, stripped-down LSU team was in the 2021 Texas Bowl when they were blown out by Kansas State. Almost nobody who had to watch that game would have turned down 10-4 and 10-3 in the next two seasons had it been offered.

And yes, a whole lot of that 20-7 came courtesy of Daniels, whose dual-threat magic created victories where defeats probably should have ensued.

The 20-7 record the last two years obscures the fact that this has been a rebuilding period. Remember – LSU was in the 30’s in terms of available scholarship players when he arrived in Baton Rouge in December of 2021. He’s had to completely remake the roster. Which he’s now done – Kelly so far has taken just three transfers for 2024, which is less than 20 percent of what he took when he was in the initial stages of the LSU rebuild.

in the old days before the transfer portal, you would look at a coach taking over a program which had fallen on such hard times and you wouldn’t expect much of anything for the first couple of years and Kelly has nonetheless gone 10-4 and 10-3.

By any objective standard that’s an amazing job.

So why isn’t he getting credit for it by so many of the grumblers?

Well, because the progress has been uneven. And yesterday’s bowl win over Wisconsin was perfectly emblematic of that.

As good as Daniels and the LSU offense has been in racking up those 10 wins, LSU’s defense has been every bit as bad. And unfortunately there simply hasn’t been any progress on the defensive side of the ball.

The 2023 LSU defense was markedly worse than the 2022 defense was. And it’s a shame, because if LSU had simply played at the same pedestrian level the 2022 defense attained, the Tigers would have been no worse than 11-1 and – if fortune had smiled on them and they’d caught Georgia in a bad performance like Alabama did in December – it could have been Jayden Daniels knocking Michigan out of the playoffs yesterday in a way Jalen Milroe wasn’t capable of doing.

There are reasons for the defensive decline. You could argue that LSU suffered from an unnatural amount of adversity on defense. After all, the single most important player on that unit was free safety Greg Brooks, the unquestioned quarterback of the secondary and its only true playmaker, and Brooks was diagnosed with brain cancer at the beginning of the season. His career has tragically ended. Obviously, Brooks’ illness is a lot more important than football, but from LSU’s on-field perspective you really can’t accurately describe how big a blow it was not to have him.

Add to that the fact that LSU didn’t have a defensive line coach this year due to the illness which took Jimmy Lindsey out of action. Kelly had to cobble together a coaching staff for the d-line after Lindsey’s loss in the summer, and it showed – other than Jordan Jefferson at defensive tackle there really wasn’t a single player who played as well as advertised in 2023.

One of the chief underachievers – though it’s totally unfair to call him that – was Mekhi Wingo, who was all set to emerge as one of the most dominant defensive tackles in college football in 2023. But Wingo fought through a groin injury the whole first half of the season and then went on the shelf when it was clear it wouldn’t heal without surgery. He missed the whole second half and only came back in time for the Reliaquest Bowl. Wingo didn’t play all that well in the game, though he did have a crucial sack on the game’s final drive.

But it’s more than that. For whatever reason, Masson Smith – who was supposed to play himself into first-round pick status – and Savion Jones failed to shine. Ovie Oghoufo, a transfer from Texas who had 7.5 sacks for his former team in 2022, was a non-factor. Highly-rated recruits DaShawn Womack and Jaxon Howard didn’t really flash. LSU’s defensive line was supposed to be a strength and it just wasn’t. Not having a full-time coach to work with them had to have played a role.

Oghoufo wasn’t the only transfer who was a big miss. The biggest was Omar Speights, a two-time All-PAC 12 linebacker who was supposed to replace Micah Baskerville. That was a disaster, as Speights had one of the worst seasons for an LSU linebacker in modern memory. And it was inexplicable. You can pull up Speights’ highlights from Oregon State and compare what’s on that film to what he did at LSU, and it doesn’t even seem like the same player. Freshman Whit Weeks, all 208 pounds of him, was considerably more productive than Speights. And the deficiencies at inside linebacker weren’t papered over by the expected emergence into superstardom by Harold Perkins; Perkins was productive in 2023 but it’s more accurate to say that he stagnated rather than improved as a defensive playmaker.

LSU also struck out badly in the transfer portal in the secondary. Kelly brought in four cornerbacks to replace Mekhi Garner, Jarrick Bernard-Converse and Jay Ward, and by the end of the season none of the four were even on the active roster. Ohio State transfer J.K. Johnson hurt an ankle and missed the whole season, Texas A&M transfer Denver Harris and Syracuse transfer Duce Chestnut had essentially quit (or been suspended from) the team before the midway point for off-field attitude issues, and Southeastern Louisiana transfer Zy Alexander, the one player of the group who was beginning to show some promise as a starter, blew a knee in the Army game and was out for the season. Another transfer safety, Andre Sam, settled in as Brooks’ replacement at free safety. Sam was productive at Marshall before he came to LSU, but athletically it was fairly clear he was better suited to the Group of 5 level.

When all that smoke cleared, the fact was that LSU’s defense was bad in just about every way it could be. The hope was that a bowl practice could lead to some degree of recovery, but a terrible Wisconsin offense, with a quarterback who’d thrown just six touchdowns all year long (though Tanner Mordecai had demonstrated prior to 2023 that he’s a capable passer), shredded LSU for over 500 yards of offense and nearly 300 in the first half alone.

The bowl game was supposed to be redemptive. It wasn’t. That LSU managed to give up only three points in the last 25 minutes of the game, and that when the outcome was directly in doubt in Wisconsin’s final possession and they’d driven nearly to LSU’s red zone but were turned away with three straight sacks of Mordecai, doesn’t really remove the sting.

That’s a bad defense.

The best thing about the Reliaquest Bowl was that Garrett Nussmeier took over for Daniels, who sat out the game to protect his draft stock from whatever injuries might have resulted in playing in essentially an exhibition game, and largely kept the Tiger offense humming in top gear. Nussmeier completed 31 of 45 passes for 395 yards and three touchdowns, against only one interception, in his first collegiate start. He isn’t going to run for 100 yards a game like Daniels did, but Nussmeier showed that he can still move the ball quickly and put points on the board.

And he did it with Nabers coming out of the locker room at halftime in street clothes. Kelly shut Nabers down after he broke the all-time LSU receiving yardage record, so after Thomas, it was Kyren Lacy, Chris Hilton and Mason Taylor (who’ll all be back this fall) doing most of the work with Nussmeier.

The point is, LSU’s offense looks like it’s going to be highly prolific in 2024 even with new people operating it. And while that ought to be comforting for the future, it actually makes the defense an even more glaring wound.

Kelly is going to have to change out his defensive coaching staff. The whole group has to go. There isn’t much of anything to hold on to, and the fact that he only signed one defensive transfer recruit, Texas A&M safety and Baton Rouge product Jardin Gilbert, means that he’s committed to improving by developing the players he already has.

What that means is better scheme and better coaching. And it has to mean different coaches.

After the game Kelly talked about LSU having stabilized and solidified the program having won 20 games in his first two years. That’s a true statement as far as it goes. But he also talked about taking the next step and actually competing for SEC titles, making the new 12-team playoff and making a run to the national championship. And he can’t get there with this defense as it’s currently set up.

Which means the grumbling from the fans will continue until he makes changes to his defensive coaching staff reflecting such an upgrade.

That we can likely expect this week. Kelly noted in his post-game press conference that it was important to keep continuity through the bowl game in hopes of a win, “and we’ve done that.” The statement implied a bit of finality which could be interpreted as a harbinger of change to come.

Let’s just hope that what changes he makes produce the same kind of momentum and synergy on defense that he’s managed on offense. If they do, talk about championships this year and next could well develop into more than just hot air.