The stuff I’ve heard about Brian Kelly over the last few weeks has been really amazing. Assumedly if I’ve heard it, the members of the LSU Board of Supervisors would also have heard it, which is why things moved as quickly as they did on Sunday.

I heard that Kelly’s attendance at LSU’s practices had become not altogether regular – as in, he’d be there and then he’d skip out for a while, and then he’d come back. I’d heard Kelly always had a glass of wine on hand when he was in his office.

I’d heard he was a very frequent patron at a few of Baton Rouge’s best restaurants, which isn’t a particularly bad thing except that he’d be there early and stay late during the season.

The picture these reports painted was of a coach who was very much mailing it in at LSU.

And it’s pretty obvious the team fed off that energy. This has been one of the most uninspired, underachieving, disinterested football teams I’ve ever seen in almost a half-century of pretty religious observances of college football. Kelly’s club looked and acted like a mediocre, soft team from the old Pac-12 conference going up against the SEC – an offense incapable of sustaining a drive, putrid special teams, a defense which against bad offenses managed to hold its own but against good offenses was run through like an OnlyFans star.

And this, with a roster universally acclaimed as a national championship contender.

Nothing about this added up other than that the coach was giving off negative-energy vibes and the players fed off those.

The whole Kelly era has been like this. LSU should have been a championship contender, but never really was. The closest the program came was in his first year, after LSU upset Alabama and clinched a spot in the SEC Championship Game. But after that came an embarrassing loss to Texas A&M and an utter blowout at the hands of Georgia before nearly losing to a bad Wisconsin team in a meaningless bowl game.

It never really got better than that, even despite Jayden Daniels’ Heisman season in 2023 which was wasted amid the worst defensive performance in school history.

So when the Tigers utterly laid down in the second half of that game Saturday and let Texas A&M do whatever it wanted in turning an 18-14 LSU halftime lead into a 49-25 humiliation, there was nothing left to salvage.

Kelly’s postgame press conference was as spiritless and disinterested as his whole tenure at LSU. It almost felt like he was about to look at his watch, trying to figure out how much longer he had to be there. And on Sunday, the Powers That Be at LSU decided they’d had enough and Kelly got his walking papers.

How it happened seems to be an item of some contention. The official story has it that Athletic Director Scott Woodward called Kelly in and demanded that he fire offensive coordinator Joe Sloan, who has been so bad this year one has almost been tempted to feel sorry for him, and Kelly refused – and that’s what brought on Kelly’s firing.

I can’t tell you definitively that isn’t true. What I can say is it’s definitely not what I heard. The way I heard it was that Kelly offered up Sloan’s head, and that not necessarily Woodward but several members of the LSU Board of Supervisors who had congregated to discuss the future of the football program were grossly unsatisfied with Sloan being made the scapegoat for this season’s awful performance. There is another story which has it that Kelly also offered up offensive line coach Brad Davis, whose unit has been inexplicably awful this year given how many highly-recruited athletes it contains, and Woodward objected.

I don’t know if I believe the last version. But what I can say is that I’d heard for quite some time that Davis, the holdover from Ed Orgeron’s staff and a Baton Rouge native, was Scott Woodward’s man on that coaching staff and that Woodward protected him when Kelly wanted to make a change after last year.

Woodward put out a statement, in any event, claiming that he’d let Kelly go and that he would find LSU another coach, and the media reports about Kelly’s firing all carry the tint of Scott Woodward in charge of the process.

And that, I’m pretty sure, is a crock.

In fact, for most of the day Sunday, it was very touch-and-go whether Scott Woodward wouldn’t also be told to clean out his desk, and in fact it seems almost certain he’s going to be a casualty of the changeover when LSU’s new president is installed on Jan. 1.

On Wednesday, the LSU presidential search committee will release its final list of candidates for the job. If I’ve heard this correctly, that list will include current interim president Matt Lee, Robert Robbins who is the former president of the University of Arizona, and McNeese State University president Wade Rousse.

Rousse is the guy they’re going to hire. He reportedly has the votes from 10 of the 16 members of the LSU Board of Supervisors and he’s Gov. Jeff Landry’s candidate. On Nov. 4, the LSU Board of Supervisors meets to pick one of the three finalists and they’re going to go with Landry’s man barring something very unforeseen.

And Landry got involved pretty heavily in what happened on Sunday, because despite the fact that he went to ULL, he’s a rabid LSU fan and it’s been driving him nuts that the Tigers are underachieving.

Woodward isn’t negotiating Kelly’s buyout. I’m not saying Landry is, but the way I hear it Landry’s got the final say. And the last I heard, Kelly and his agent had come off their demand for the full $53 million to be paid out in monthly installments between now and the end of 2031; their number was $43 million.

LSU/Landry’s number is more like $20 million.

You wonder why Kelly wouldn’t jack LSU up for the whole $53 million? Well, there are items of leverage LSU has that it would be better not to discuss in this post. Also, if there’s a negotiated settlement that puts the contract to bed, it makes for a cleaner exit that paves the way for Kelly to take another job somewhere.

But this is a guy who told people at Notre Dame he was only interested in coaching for a couple more years and then he was done. He’d built a retirement house. And then Woodward threw a 10-year, $95-million contract at him, apparently without doing much vetting to see if he was a burnout case.

Which he was.

Kelly clearly looked at LSU and figured that if idiots like Les Miles and Ed Orgeron could win national championships here, he wouldn’t have any trouble doing so. And honestly, that isn’t a terrible bit of reasoning. It really should have worked out that way.

Except while Miles and Orgeron might have been blockheads, they were blockheads who absolutely worked their tails off to win those national titles. Brian Kelly enjoyed a glass – or several – of mellifluous cabernet in his office or at Gino’s instead.

And you saw how it worked out.

Now, Sloan has been let go as the offensive coordinator by interim head coach Frank Wilson. We don’t yet know Davis’ fate.

And we don’t know Woodward’s, but we can guess.

The guess here is that Rousse will get his vote from the LSU Board of Supervisors on Nov. 4, and while he won’t officially be LSU’s president until Jan. 1, he’ll unofficially take over that job immediately after being named. And Rousse will either sack Woodward on the spot, or he’ll be a lame-duck AD until he’s replaced over the summer.

And Rousse is going to hire the next football coach at LSU.

How’s that going to work? We’re not sure. McNeese hasn’t done a lot in football lately, so that isn’t much to draw from. But Wade Rousse is the guy who hired Will Wade to coach basketball there after Woodward fired him, and that association is a pretty decent data point in evaluating the level of esteem Rousse can be expected to have of Woodward.

This means the Scott Woodward style of hiring old established names to over-the-top contracts certain to generate ruinous buyouts has breathed its last at LSU – even if Woodward himself hasn’t. We don’t have any names to offer as to a new coach yet, though later this week that could change, but it seems obvious LSU is going younger, more energetic, probably cheaper and definitely shorter on a contract – and any coach who wants to jack Rousse/Landry/LSU up for some 10-year deal is going to find himself dropped from contention.

Which is a change that’s overdue. Among lots of changes at LSU that are overdue.