Brian Kelly can recruit like a champ at LSU, and he’ll have to deliver a championship

Brian Kelly has done everything but a national championship with Fighting Irish.

He will need to take the next step with the Tigers. Yahoo Sports ‘Pete Thamel reported that Kelly was leaving Notre Dame for LSU, with an announcement scheduled for Tuesday.

It was the second shake-up in days after Lincoln Riley left Oklahoma for USC. The basic premise of hiring Kelly is simple.

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Kelly will deal with fewer hiring restrictions at LSU than he did at Notre Dame, and that would make a national championship team.

Based on 247Sports General Recruitment Ranking, Notre Dame has two times better class enrollment than LSU since 2010. Ireland’s average class ranks 12.3. LSU’s grade point average is 6.7. Here’s a look at the layers side by side.

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Recruiting LSU vs. Notre Dame since 2010

During that period, the LSU was 114-39, half a game better than Notre Dame’s 113-40. So that’s why Kelly was able to better recruit with the SEC facility and win her first national championship.

Kelly handles the pressure of being a coach at Notre Dame. He overcame Knute Rockne as the show’s all-time winning coach this season and led the show to a BCS championship match and two CFP appearances. Notre Dame could be this year’s CFP with a little help getting into the conference championship weekend.

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However, the knockout is a poor record against the top 10 teams. Kelly has a 3-10 record against the top 10 teams, and that includes the 7th loss to Cincinnati this year. After last year’s 31-14 loss to Alabama in the CFP semi-finals, Kelly said “We just need a little more firepower.”

He’s going to have it at LSU, but the question is: Why leave Notre Dame to the last team in the Western SEC, aside from the reported $100 million contract?

It’s a chance to win the national championship. Notre Dame hasn’t won a national title since 1988. Nick Saban (2003), Les Miles (2009) and Ed Orgeron (2019) have all won national titles with the Tigers of the 21st Century. Kelly, 60, has won the title. won a couple of Division II national championships at Grand Valley State from 2002-03, and the FBS national championship would be the stepping stone to a stellar career in the Hall of Fame.

With that, however, expectations increased. LSU just broke up with Orgeron two years after one of the Tigers led by Joe Burrow put together one of the best seasons in college football history. The Tigers are still losing 4-12 to Saban since he took over Alabama in 2007. All of the SEC West schools make for a flop in 2021. Fox analyst and former quarterback Notre Dame, Brady Quinn had a clear response to the hiring with a question: “Why?”

Kelly is putting herself in a pressure cooker with nothing or nothing. Anything that lacks a national title means this gamble has failed.

This will be a lot harder than the five-match ACC arrangement that Notre Dame has, and that means many of the top 10 opponents will be coming regularly. Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher, a national champion coach at Florida State (2013), has a similar to-do list at Texas A&M. He beat Alabama this year and still finished 8-4. After four years, Fisher is still looking for a championship, never mind a national championship.

A national championship is the expectation now for Kelly, one that will be as difficult as the road he took at Notre Dame. Kelly might have more firepower at LSU.

But he’ll do a lot more with it.