Brian Kelly left Notre Dame for LSU three years ago, and in that time he’s posted a 29-11 record, three bowl wins, had a Heisman Trophy winner and played in the SEC Championship game.

It’s not an insignificant slate of achievements, though having struggled through a 9-4 mark in 2024 when most LSU fans figured on making the playoffs put a bit of a damper on the perception of Kelly and his program. The bloom is off the rose a little where he’s concerned, especially when Kelly said all along after signing on as the Tigers’ head coach that he ought to be judged on how he does in Year Three.

Well, in Year Three his team wasn’t as good as it was in Kelly’s first two years.

And worse than that, Notre Dame is playing for a national championship under Kelly’s successor Marcus Freeman. Because of that, call-in talk shows, message boards and social media are flogging Kelly for having left Notre Dame and/or failing to achieve at LSU what Freeman has.

It’s a fun narrative for the Kelly haters to run with. Is it fair?

Not really. There are some legitimate criticisms to be voiced within the Kelly-is-underachieving camp, but on the other hand this new obsession with Freeman at Kelly’s expense certainly misses a lot.

For example, Marcus Freeman hasn’t built anything. What he’s done is maintain the program Kelly built, with a coaching staff largely made up of Kelly’s hires. Even offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock, who is credited with taking Notre Dame’s offense to the next level this year, was with Kelly in Baton Rouge for the 2022 and 2023 seasons and had been a Kelly assistant in a couple of previous stops.

Freeman has a great defense made up largely of veterans Kelly recruited at Notre Dame. He has a great offensive line made up largely of Kelly recruits. He has a good quarterback in Riley Leonard who transferred from Duke after Notre Dame, post-Kelly, began allowing for easier accommodation of transfer-portal additions and becoming competitive with NIL.

A sore point which led to Kelly leaving Notre Dame was his ongoing friction with then-athletic director Jack Swarbrick, who didn’t want to turn loose the money to put Notre Dame’s program on an equal footing with the top SEC teams, for example.

Let’s remember that Notre Dame was 12-1 and ranked 5th when Kelly left for LSU. He’d made three appearances in either the BCS national championship game or four-team playoffs, getting spanked all three times. But the teams applying those beatdowns – Alabama in 2012 and 2020 and Clemson in 2018 – were absolutely great teams. Nobody in college football this year holds a candle to either of those three teams.

None of this is intended to sully what Freeman has done. He’ll play Ohio State for a national championship next week and, though the Buckeyes are likely favorites, nobody would be surprised if Notre Dame won the title. And whether Freeman built that program or not, what he’s doing there should make him the national coach of the year.

But why is Freeman in this position and not Kelly?

At heart, that’s what lots of LSU fans are asking. And for them, there is some light at the end of a tunnel which is longer than it should be.

You could see the first three seasons of Kelly’s time at LSU in two different ways.

Conventionally, you’d say that the 9-4 season in 2024 was a step down from the first two, when he was able to win 20 games behind the star power of Jayden Daniels, Malik Nabers and Brian Thomas – three current NFL rookie superstars. And you’d note that LSU’s talent was down in 2024, which explained that terrible three-game losing skid in the second half of the season which knocked the team out of the playoffs.

We’ll explore the dynamics of that in a second. But what I would argue is Kelly’s LSU tenure so far ought to be analyzed in a different way.

Namely, that Daniels, Nabers and Thomas masked the true state of the program in Kelly’s first two seasons, and they inflated what would otherwise had been a program that won 13 or 14 games in that stretch to a 20-win program. Had Daniels, Nabers and Thomas been simply above-average, productive college players rather than NFL superstars, LSU would likely have been a 6-6 or 7-5 type team in 2022 and 2023, lacking depth and physicality and failing miserably on defense.

And the 2024 team actually made a few strides on those fronts even though its 9-4 record was a bit of a step back from the 10-win seasons Jayden Daniels produced.

In other words, LSU was moving forward rather than backward. You just didn’t see it because of the shiny objects now in the NFL.

And that can be true alongside what else is true, which is that Kelly broke the glass on the fire alarm and has become the most aggressive coach in college football seeking talent in the transfer portal.

There’s a reason that was necessary.

He talked at length over the course of the 2024 season about how young his team was in spots, particularly on defense. Kelly noted that he was playing more than a half-dozen true freshmen on defense and that five of his 11 defensive starters were freshmen or sophomores. And there’s no doubt that’s an awfully young defense.

But why was the team so young?

Because Kelly’s first two high school recruiting classes in 2022 and 2023 were, in a word, terrible.

LSU did get some high-end talent out of the 2022 recruiting class. Will Campbell, Emory Jones and Mason Taylor will all be drafted in April after very solid careers, and Harold Perkins should have a real breakout season next year playing the “star” position, a hybrid linebacker-safety role that he’s well-suited for but instead insisted on trying to play an inside linebacker spot last year before he got hurt. Perkins at his best is one of the most disruptive defenders in college football; maybe we’ll get to see that consistently next year.

Beyond those four? Bo Bordelon, who’ll compete for a starting job on the offensive line this spring and who has moonlighted as the blocking tight end in short-yardage situations, is the only other player left from the 2022 recruiting class.

You heard that correctly. As of now, Perkins and Bordelon are the only players left from that 15-member high school recruiting class. Three of them have turned pro, 10 of them have transferred away. None of the transfers have shown themselves to be star players elsewhere.

LSU took 15 transfers in 2022, and there Kelly fared a lot better. Daniels was one of those players. So were Mekhi Wingo, Myles Frazier, Greg Brooks, Mekhi Garner, Noah Cain, Jay Bramblett and Jarrick Bernard-Converse, all of whom were quality contributors and many have gone on to the NFL. One of those transfers, West Weeks, will still be on this fall’s roster and he’ll start at linebacker along his superstar brother Whit.

If you want to know why LSU didn’t make the playoffs this past season, there’s your answer. You can’t miss on as many recruits as Kelly did without suffering for it.

And things didn’t get a lot better in 2023.

There are six players from Kelly’s 4th-ranked 2023 recruiting class who have started games for LSU. Whit Weeks and Ashton Stamps were full-time starters on defense this past year, Javien Toviano started a few games at cornerback after injuries decimated the position in 2023 and he also started the Texas Bowl at safety this past season, D.J. Chester started at center all year, Paul Mubenga stepped in after Garrett Dellinger got hurt in the Texas A&M game and started at left guard the rest of the season, and Tyree Adams took over at left tackle in the Texas Bowl after Campbell opted out. Additionally, Kyle Parker is a very promising wide receiver who’ll break out before he’s done at LSU, Kaleb Jackson has seen some action at running back, Dylan Carpenter has been a decent reserve at defensive end and Trey Holly looks like a promising running back still part of LSU’s program whose career is on hold with legal problems.

That’s it. Everybody else is gone from the 2023 class. Out of 26 recruits, 16 of them are now elsewhere. And the vast majority of those departed have yet to show themselves as top-tier college football players. Perhaps the best of them, Lance Heard, started at left tackle at Tennessee this past year – and Heard’s performance was, to put it kindly, problematic for the Vols.

Kelly did get some quality contributors out of the transfer portal that year. Specifically, Jordan Jefferson was a good one-year rental at defensive tackle on his way to the NFL, Zy Alexander struggled a bit last year and then tore his ACL but came back and had a very good 2024, and Braedyn Swinson turned out to be a terrific edge rusher. Also, Paris Shand played a lot of snaps along the defensive line the last two years. Aaron Anderson popped as a wide receiver in 2024 and looks like one of the SEC’s coming stars. And Omar Speights started most of the 2023 season, played horribly, and just made the NFL’s All-Rookie team as an undrafted free agent to the confusion of many who watched him at LSU in 2023. Beyond that, the 2023 transfer class was…not good.

The 2024 recruiting class so far looks a whole lot better. It provided more key contributors as true freshmen this past year than the 2023 class provided as redshirt freshmen and true sophomores. Kelly’s purge of his defensive coaching staff after the 2023 season did a lot to right the ship on talent evaluation and recruiting.

But there were still holes all over the roster thanks to the sins of 2022 and 2023.

Give Kelly credit, though. He’s generally pretty good about fixing his own mistakes, which is something quite rare among football coaches. When his defensive coaching staff was badly outmatched in the SEC and that became glaringly obvious after the 2023 season, he made wholesale changes and LSU has excellent recruiters and coaches on defense now.

And he’s gone from viewing the transfer portal as a place to find a few extra bodies to a true source of talent.

Kelly just picked up Texas A&M tight end Donovan Green over the weekend, which makes the 15th transfer portal addition this year. That ties the 15 players he signed in 2022, when he was desperate to restock a roster badly depleted in Ed Orgeron’s last year. This transfer class is rated #1 in the country and it’s full of plug-and-play starters. As many as 10 of the 15 could be in the starting lineup this fall, and Kelly is still looking for a safety and an offensive lineman who could push the number of transfer starters to 12.

Adding guys like Patrick Payton, Mansoor Delane, Braelon Moore, Nic Anderson, Barian Brown, Jack Pyburn, Josh Thompson and Grant Chadwick makes for immediate upgrades either at positions played badly by 2024 starters or at positions where LSU would otherwise be forced to throw young players into the fire and hope for the best.

And all of a sudden a roster with a bunch of holes in it begins to look like something you’d expect in a playoff team.

USA Today’s Blake Toppmeyer had a piece on Thursday noting that Kelly was winning this college football offseason. He’s likely right. And with Garrett Nussmeier coming back for his fifth-year, Kelly has a quarterback as good or better than any in the country to lead that juiced-up LSU team. While Kelly might not have liked the asked-for judgment of his performance in Year Three, he’s poised for a lot better result in Year Four.

But a lot of this heartache and friction wouldn’t have been necessary had it not been for the poor evaluations and recruiting in those first two years Kelly was on the job. From an LSU fan perspective, a whole lot of grumbling will go away if this mass of newcomers comes together with a reasonably good returning core of talent, and that’s what Kelly hopes for.

But it’s like he said. “This is a championship program.” And that’s the expectation he has to meet. It doesn’t help him that his successor is doing just that in South Bend.