Kenzel Kelly is the son of recently-fired LSU head coach Brian Kelly. The younger Kelly was brought in as a preferred walkon linebacker this year, and on Saturday he did the Senior Night runout onto the field.

That devolved into a mess of Kenzel Kelly’s making. First was this…

BK wanted to be there for me…Unfortunately the new leadership at LSU did not see it the same way… #freeBK https://t.co/jGHp4WP2Op

— Kenzel Kelly (@Kenzel_kelly) November 23, 2025

And then came this…

That’s about as cringe and embarrassing as anything we’ve seen, for certain, but it’s of a piece with the fact that the situation with Brian Kelly is beginning to thicken.

As you’re surely aware, Brian Kelly went to court seeking a declaratory judgment that he was terminated without cause by LSU, a judgment that would do very little other than strengthen his bargaining position vis-a-vis the contract buyout. When Kenzel Kelly barks “Free my boy BK” at the SEC Network cameras, it isn’t just a bad commentary on the state of American youth; it’s a demand that the coach be given the largest pot of gold possible without being encumbered by the mitigation clause in his contract.

Because what’s happening right now is that Kelly is catching a monthly check from LSU of some $800,000 and change and he’ll continue to receive that through 2031 per the terms of his contract. But Kelly has a duty to find another paying job that would offset that princely sum he’s being paid by LSU.

And that’s the problem.

Brian Kelly doesn’t want to find another job. Brian Kelly already retired before he was fired. If you watched his team play this season you already know that. So mitigating that contract by finding another coaching job? Nah. He’d rather drink his wine on the back patio of that retirement home he built even before Scott Woodward, then the LSU athletic director, threw him that idiotic contract.

And LSU made him an offer of $30 million in cold, hard cash to “free my boy BK.” That wasn’t enough, and then My Boy BK filed that lawsuit.

What happened on Friday was interesting. What generated headlines was that, apparently, the LSU Board of Supervisors went into a closed-door session and OK’ed a $98 million contract offer to Lane Kiffin. But in public, what was reported was that they authorized new university president Wade Rousse to terminate Kelly.

But the authorization included the power to terminate Kelly with cause.

Termination with cause means LSU doesn’t have to pay that buyout. Not the $54 million up front that Kelly’s lawyers are demanding, and not the 800K per month for the next six years.

Assumedly, Rousse and newly-appointed athletic director Verge Ausberry have spent the last four weeks or so building the file on Kelly that Woodward didn’t bother to do before he unceremoniously dumped him after the Texas A&M game. Kelly’s lawsuit made the case that Kelly was never given any reason why he’d be fired for cause; that’s because Woodward didn’t bother to do basic HR work, as we understand it. You’d expect that would have been remedied by now and LSU would have a bullet list of items outlining the university’s side of the story that we haven’t heard so far.

Do these need to be smoking guns? No. After watching the Western Kentucky game and seeing the atrocious state of LSU’s offense, there is a certain res ipsa loquitor aspect to his firing – as in, how could a football program with the resources of LSU, in the fourth year of the head coach’s term, be this incompetent on the field if that coach was honestly doing his best?

What I’m driving at is an expected scenario. I envision Rousse and LSU’s lawyers, who at this point will come from the Louisiana Attorney General’s office, sitting down with Kelly’s people and presenting a last cash buyout offer. Maybe it’s $32.5 million, maybe it’s $35 million. Whatever.

But that offer is going to have a steel spine.

If you don’t take this, will be the message, we’re going to drop a termination-for-cause letter on you. Here’s what will be in that letter, and while you might argue nothing in it is a fireable offense it’ll all be pretty embarrassing and it’ll also be damaging to your efforts at getting another job.

Which you’re going to be more likely to want to do, because when we drop that letter on you, those monthly 800K checks stop.

And you can sue us if you want. In Baton Rouge. In front of a jury of pissed-off LSU fans who had to watch you give us the worst special teams we’ve ever had  in 2022, the worst defense we’ve ever had in 2023 and the worst offense we’ve ever had in 2025. Let’s see how willing they’re going to be to say we had no cause to fire you.

Oh, by the way, should you win that judgment you’ll want, and be holding a piece of paper which says LSU owes you $54 million, congrats. That’s not a judgment against TAF. It’s not a judgment against LSU’s boosters and donors. It’s against LSU, which is an arm of the State of Louisiana. You might not have understood what the Governor was talking about when he messaged that the taxpayers were the ones ultimately liable for your contract, but you’ll absolutely understand it when you have to wait for the state legislature to appropriate money to pay off that judgment.

After you’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars out of your current financial stash to pay lawyers to get you the judgment on that buyout.

If you’re Brian Kelly, you really don’t have a whole lot of choice but to take that offer, whatever it is, and slink off into retirement.

Kenzel will be just fine, of course. His dad can’t spend all of that buyout money before he kicks off. Although if I’m Brian, I tell him never to call me “his boy” again if he wants to stay in the will.