Down on the bayou, they’ve got a sayin.
C’est tout!
It’s pronounced SAY-too and it’s Cajun French for, “That’s all.”
And that is all. For Brian Kelly.
Sunday was a busy day in Baton Rouge. Meetings. Phone calls. Zooms. Even a drafted resolution for a multi-million-dollar buyout for the school’s 64-year-old, fourth-year coach.
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Shall I put it in south Louisiana terms? With the arrival of gumbo weather, things got quite spicy on the bayou (I’ll see myself out).
Kelly’s future as LSU’s football coach is over: He’s out.
Some of the school’s most prominent donors, key university board members and athletic officials — even political figures — met over the course of several hours on Sunday about the issue and are still haggling over the coaches’ $53 million buyout with his representatives (they haven’t reached a resolution). It’s a whopping figure for a state and school devoid of the resources of, say, Texas or Texas A&M. But it’s not an impossible price tag.
On Sunday evening, sometime just before 7 p.m. CT and after a meeting at the Louisiana governor’s mansion (yes, the governor’s mansion), decision-makers pulled the plug on the Brian Kelly Experiment.
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If you’re wondering why such a decision was made inside the walls of the 25,000-square foot Greek Revival home sitting three miles north of LSU’s campus, well, have we got a story for you.
As most things go in south Louisiana, politics is involved. The decision to fire Kelly extended to the state’s top elected official, Jeff Landry, a brash first-term Republican who, you should know, tweeted this on Saturday night after Texas A&M bludgeoned LSU in Tiger Stadium, 49-25.
More importantly, though, Landry has significant influence over the university’s highest decision-making group: the 14-member LSU Board of Supervisors (Landry has appointed six of them and he’s due to appoint four more next year when their terms expire).
Making matters more complicated is the fact that LSU is searching for a permanent university president. The school announced five finalists earlier this week, and a decision is expected soon — a move that rests mostly with Landry and the board itself.
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In the absence of a permanent president, the governor has grabbed authority over key decisions, especially those that cost the price of a small island.
“It’s the most Louisiana thing ever that the governor is directly involved in a decision over a football coach,” said one LSU influencer.
At the heart of the issue is money, of course. While the buyout figure is lofty, the roughly $53 million owed to Kelly (90% of his remaining salary) is reduced by his future work in coaching as well as media. No lump sum is required. It can be paid in monthly installments (about $800,000 a month) over several years.
Brian Kelly finishes his LSU tenure with a record of 34-14, but lost at least three games in every season in Baton Rouge. (Justin Ford/Getty Images)
(Justin Ford via Getty Images)
Kelly has expressed to those at LSU and elsewhere that he wants to coach again — a move that could drastically reduce the buyout or potentially result in a negotiated lump payment. Given his record, he is likely to find a job if he really wants one. After all, he won at least nine games in his last eight full seasons as coach (five at Notre Dame). This year at LSU, his three losses were to teams ranked No. 3, No. 7 and No. 9.
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Kelly appeared at a team meeting Sunday, telling players, “Love y’all. Finish the season!”
Earlier Sunday, as LSU officials and donors as well as Louisiana political figures considered all of these aspects, weighing the costs of keeping him versus cutting bait, the decision was clear: This wasn’t salvageable.
It was to the point that one leading LSU figure noted on Sunday evening that Kelly couldn’t explain why his players weren’t playing harder. He’d lost the locker room, says another person.
“We are soft,” said a third.
Either way, the Tigers, now led by interim coach Frank Wilson, are off this coming week before traveling to Alabama for a nationally televised game in which three-loss LSU will likely to be a more than touchdown underdog to its bitter rival and a program that, for decades now, has crapped in its jambalaya.
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But, hold up for a second, how did we get here?
Well, that’s going to take some time. Time that we don’t have. But the short of it is, the Tigers hired Kelly away from Notre Dame to win SEC championships, advance to the playoff and compete for all the marbles. And while 34 wins over three-and-a-half seasons is not bad work, more was expected.
They’ve fired people on the bayou for much less. LSU canned its last two coaches, each of whom won a national championship (Les Miles in 2007 and Ed Orgeron in 2019).
Athletic director Scott Woodward, as politically connected in the state and lovingly embraced as anyone on campus, made the decision to fire Orgeron. But Woodward’s authority in making this decision is in question, some believe. After all, again, the governor got involved.
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Woodward has hired two coaches who have won national titles at LSU (Jay Johnson in baseball and Kim Mulkey in women’s basketball). But we all know football moves the needle more than anything in college athletics.
Will Woodward hire the next coach? It appears so.
In a statement released from the school, Woodward announced that a national search will begin immediately for a new head coach and, “I am confident in our ability to bring to Baton Rouge an outstanding leader, teacher and coach, who fits our culture and community and who embraces the excellence that we demand.”
LSU football is a power unlike anything else in the state, perhaps the single most influential and powerful entity across the boot of Louisiana. More than the NFL’s New Orleans Saints, yes. And the seafood industry even. The oil rigs too.
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It’s a reason that the state’s politics and LSU football are tethered to one another, linked forever, symbiotic organisms coexisting for the good or the bad — a relationship that began 100 years ago when former Gov. Huey Long, known to lead the LSU band in its march across the field, orchestrated some political maneuvering to help build Tiger Stadium itself.
Politics and LSU Football — like hot boudin and cold couche-couche (Google it).
After all, Woodward himself was a former elite level political lobbyist, hired to join the university by then-LSU president Mark Emmert (yes, that Mark Emmert). Woodward, Emmert and a crew of boosters eventually hired a man named Nick Saban in 1999. Saban, you know by now, awakened the LSU Football Machine, a beast shaken from its slumber to compile more than 200 wins and three national titles under three different head coaches over a 20-season span (2000-2019).
On Saturday night, that beast lay bloodied and beaten, out-coached, outplayed and completely emasculated by, of all programs, the one they used to dominate (LSU beat A&M seven straight times at one point last decade).
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The Aggies did their stomping and then they did their singing, all amid an empty Tiger Stadium, the Aggie War Hymn the only tunes filtering across the muggy Saturday night. Chairbacks were empty. Club seats too. Suites had mostly emptied as coach Mike Elko and Texas A&M continued its thumping. As Kelly exited the field and into the tunnel, insults rained down on him from a small group of remaining LSU fans, surely staying just to let him have it.
Meanwhile, above them in those suites, high-level political figures and executives were passing around the proverbial church basket: How much would you commit to the buyout?
“Apathy is second to this program,” said one LSU powerbroker Sunday. “What happened to Saturday night cannot happen.”
Especially after the offseason investment.
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Trailing many of its conference mates in NIL funding for years now, LSU raised more than $13 million to frontload to its 2025 roster, signing arguably the country’s No. 1-ranked portal class and returning a Heisman Trophy frontrunner at quarterback.
What do they have to show for it? The 98th-ranked unit in total offense and a team that, before Saturday, joined lowly North Carolina as the only power conference program not to score at least 25 points in a single game against a fellow power league team this year (they hit 25 on a garbage-time TD with 1:12 left on Saturday).
“After the dollars we spent, I’m shocked at how bad this team has played,” said one leading donor.
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But is all the outrage justified?
As one person quipped on Sunday, “This is the age of outrage. There is no more patience.”
That’s playing out across the country. Fan revolts. Fired coach chants. Big buyouts.
If LSU agrees eventually to the full cost of the buyout, it would be the second-highest committed buyout to a college head coach and the third of at least $21 million this year (James Franklin at Penn State for $50 million and Billy Napier at Florida for $21 million). Those rank No. 2, No. 3 and No. 4 in highest coaching buyouts of all time, all of them trailing the $77 million that Texas A&M paid Jimbo Fisher in a contract that was originally executed by Woodward, then A&M’s AD.
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With Kelly’s $53 million figure, more than $160 million would have been spent on 10 fired FBS coaches. That’s believed to be a record. And it’s not even October.
Now, for the third time in nine years, LSU — one of the most heavily resourced and well-positioned jobs in the country — is open in what is expected to be, quite possibly, the busiest coaching carousel in industry history. Penn State. Florida. Perhaps soon Auburn and Florida State, too.
That’s why so many were left shocked on Sunday. Well, that and the amount of cash needed to pay Kelly, the current staff and a new head coach and staff. That figure may exceed $100 million.
“I don’t know where this money comes from,” said one LSU official.
Rebutted another: “You can always find the money.”
And so, for now, at least for this column, that is all.
C’est tout!
