Brian Kelly on LSU’s Week 1 win over Clemson: ‘I had a hard time watching it’

It’s been 11 months since Brian Kelly last stood on the Tiger Stadium sideline as LSU‘s head football coach. But as Kelly sat beside his wife watching his former team demolish Clemson, 51-10, on Saturday night, the wound of his unceremonious firing last October proved to be too much to bear. “I’ll be honest, I had a hard time watching it,” Kelly said Thursday on SiriusXM. “But I don’t think it was just LSU, it was just the first weekend truly of college football, and it was hard. You’ve been doing it for 35 years, and not to be part of that process, my wife wanted to kill me. She was like, ‘What’s wrong with you?’ What was wrong was I wasn’t on the sidelines, and I had to deal with it and get through it.” [ $19.99 gets you a FULL year of On3 | Rivals national coverage ] The 64-year-old Kelly is in the midst of his first college football season away from the sideline after spending the prior 35 seasons as a head coach, including the past four seasons at LSU. But that all came to an end on Oct. 26, 2025, when Kelly was fired following a disappointing 5-3 start to last season. Of course, Kelly has managed to stay around the sport in his new role as a college football analyst for CBS Sports. And despite some difficulties watching the game, Kelly couldn’t help but acknowledge how impressive the 8th-ranked Tigers (1-0) looked in its first game under new head coach Lane Kiffin. Behind a bevy of new faces acquired via the NCAA Transfer Portal, including star quarterback Sam Leavitt, LSU outgained overmatched Clemson 644-145 in total yards and limited the visiting Tigers to just 1-of-13 on third downs in the 51-10 rout Saturday night in Baton Rouge. “But there’s no mistaking it, LSU looked great, and obviously it’s a little bit of both – was Clemson maybe not as good as we thought? And certainly LSU was on fire, and that showed in the game,” Kelly continued. “Props to LSU, they played great. But I think it’s like (what) we talked about Michigan, it’s one game. Let’s see what this looks like throughout the entire year. Can they keep the same energy? But they looked really good.” Brian Kelly: LSU has a ‘national championship defense’ Despite his difficulties watching the game, Brian Kelly saw plenty to like about Lane Kiffin’s new-look LSU. In particular, Kelly couldn’t say enough about the Tigers’ defense under third-year coordinator Blake Baker. “I think what I walk away from in watching the game is, is some of the things that I struggled with in the last year is that we did not run the ball efficiently,” Kelly said this week on Sirius XM. “I thought they (LSU) ran the ball extremely well. And I know Blake, I hired Blake Baker, the defensive coordinator. I thought their defense looked every bit (like) a national championship defense, in the pieces that he has. So I guess we all know this, right? We’ve been around it. If you have a great defense and you can run the football, everybody’s working on the other pieces, right? “Nobody’s a complete football team. And I think those are the two things that I take away. I love what the defense looks like and the running game being really effective is really gonna bode well for this football team to be in it when we get down to the last few teams.” Kelly hired Baker away from Missouri ahead of the 2024 season, and Kiffin made it a priority to retain him when he took over last December. In fact, Baker reportedly turned down an opportunity to become head coach at his alma mater, Tulane, to stay in Baton Rouge under Kiffin. Of course, a significant raise making Baker college football’s highest-paid coordinator at $3.5 million annually didn’t hurt either. — On3’s Nick Kosko contributed to this report.