LSU finished just outside of the Top 25 in the final college football coaches’ poll for the 2024 season. The Tigers were tops among the Also Receiving Votes category.

A 9-4 record isn’t horrible, but it’s also not a record good enough to squawk about not being ranked, either. And considering that LSU’s four losses came to a USC team which finished 7-6, a Texas A&M team which finished 8-5, a 9-4 Alabama team and 8-5 Florida, it was a pretty mediocre season even with some nice wins over Ole Miss, South Carolina on the road and Baylor in the Texas Bowl.

But this is not the result Brian Kelly is being paid for. Everyone knows it, including Kelly. That’s one reason why he’s been the most aggressive coach in college football in restocking his roster full of high-profile athletes from the transfer portal this offseason, stacking that talent on top of a fairly strong core of returning players and a Top 10 high school recruiting class.

But as I noted in a post a few days ago, Kelly is paying for mistakes he made at the beginning of his tenure at LSU. He didn’t hire well on his defensive coaching staff upon taking the LSU job; in fact, LSU might have been better off had he retained the defensive coaches left over from Ed Orgeron’s tenure. Two of those coaches, Blake Baker and Corey Raymond, Kelly ended up hiring back last year. Additionally, and perhaps as a product of the bad coaching hires on defense, Kelly’s first two recruiting classes at LSU were demonstrable busts – necessitating his playing perhaps too many freshmen in 2024 to truly compete at a high level.

And things were made worse by the fact that in Kelly’s first two seasons as LSU’s head coach, three players who became NFL superstars as rookies this year (Jayden Daniels, who’s unquestionably the rookie of the year, Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas) put on a show and led the team to 10-win seasons the rest of the roster really couldn’t support. Those performances covered up weaknesses that otherwise would have made LSU a 6-6 or 7-5 team; the 2024 season would thus have been seen in a much different light.

And the fact that Kelly’s successor at Notre Dame Marcus Freeman, an outstanding young coach who deserves some national coach of the year recognition, put his team into the national championship game Monday night makes the caterwauling about Kelly’s performance even greater.

LSU fans are participating in that, which can be viewed as aftershocks from the terrible three-game losing streak the 2024 team uncorked on its way out of playoff contention. but the bulk of it comes from Notre Dame fans who suffered so much emotional trauma at the idea their coach might have opted for greener pastures that they cannot act or speak rationally where Kelly is concerned.

A few things are true at the same time.

Kelly is a very good coach who has won multiple national championships, albeit at the Division II level with Grand Valley State. That was the first of four programs he built; Kelly also built conference championship programs at Central Michigan, Cincinnati and Notre Dame before coming to LSU. It’s almost certain that he will build a championship program at LSU.

Marcus Freeman is an excellent coach who maximized the talent he had available this year and had perhaps the best season Notre Dame has had since Lou Holtz won a national championship in 1988.

Freeman inherited a program that was ranked No. 5 in the country and had gone 12-1 in Kelly’s final season. He hasn’t had to build anything. Much of his roster was recruiting by Kelly and a decent slice of his coaching staff were either Kelly’s coaches or in his coaching tree. What can be best said about Freeman is that he’s doing a terrific job of maintaining Kelly’s success while imprinting his own signature on the program.

Notre Dame’s resource base for football is better now than it was when Kelly left. His departure for LSU was a wakeup call at Notre Dame, as alumni like Brady Quinn got together to fund improvements and the NIL budget to make the Irish a lot more competitive than they were. Kelly himself has had to get involved in a similar project at LSU, pumping a million dollars of his own money into the school’s NIL collective in order to remedy a deficiency.

College football has changed greatly since Kelly changed jobs. Nick Saban isn’t at Alabama anymore, Georgia has taken a step back from its dominance and the field is much more open. The Ohio State team that throttled Freeman’s Notre Dame team on Monday night was of similar quality talent-wise to those great Alabama and Georgia teams, but it looked very pedestrian at times – particularly in an inexplicable loss to Michigan at the end of the regular season. That’s something to be expected in the age of NIL and the transfer portal, when top players are far more mercenary and it’s a lot harder to build chemistry and discipline in a locker room. Between that and a 12-team playoff, it’s a whole lot easier to ride a good draw deep into the playoffs.

Notre Dame caught an Indiana team which had done a nice job in the regular season in going 11-1, but had been butchered by Ohio State in their only real playoff-level test, in the first round. That was an easy draw. Then they caught Georgia with an injured Carson Beck and with tragedy striking head coach Kirby Smart’s family (his father died from a fall) less than 24 hours before the game. Then they caught a Penn State team which was certainly not one of the four best teams in America in the semifinal game. Not to diminish their run, because the Georgia and Penn State wins were upset victories, but this past year was the first time anyone could have the level of fortune Notre Dame had. Nobody got a draw like that in a four-team playoff.

Freeman’s loss to Ohio State might have been a little less of a beatdown than Kelly’s playoff losses to 2012 Alabama, 2018 Clemson and 2020 Alabama, but only on the scoreboard. When the Buckeyes went up 31-7, they all but shut everything down waiting for the clock to run out. Yes, the Irish whittled the lead down to a one-score game before Ohio State finally put it away, but the issue was never really in doubt in the second half. And this Ohio State team, deserving champion that it is, is not the juggernaut those Alabama and Clemson teams were which sent Kelly back to South Bend in defeat.

So hopefully we can dispose of this business of Brian Kelly being a bum and Marcus Freeman being a superstar. It was irritating before it was disproven on Monday night, and now there’s a new season and a fresh set of narratives to explore.

That said, 2025 has to be a different result for LSU and its coach. If Notre Dame makes the playoffs again and LSU doesn’t, there will be hell to pay not just for Kelly but for Scott Woodward, the athletic director who gave him a $100 million contract.

Yesterday on his podcast, Baton Rouge radio host Matt Moscona offered an interesting take on the Kelly-Freeman debate…