Kirby Smart: LSU coaches ‘borrow’ offices, adds context to Brian Kelly firing

ATHENS — Kirby Smart has walked the hallways of the LSU football building and understands all that comes with coaching in that program.

“I coached at LSU, and a guy once told me, he said, ‘That office you’re in, that’s not your office, you’re borrowing it,’ “ Smart said of the 2004 season he spent on Nick Saban’s staff with the Tigers.

“I knew right then that if you didn’t win, you wouldn’t be there long.”

At that, winning at a 70-percent clip wasn’t enough for Brian Kelly to keep his job, as he was fired on Sunday despite a 34-14 (.708) record.

LSU athletic director Scott Woodward released a statement that put the high expectations that come with the job in Baton Rouge into perspective.

“When Coach Kelly arrived at LSU four years ago, we had high hopes that he would lead us to multiple SEC and national championships during his time in Baton Rouge,” Woodward penned.

“Ultimately, the success at the level that LSU demands simply did not materialize … “

Georgia’s 15-0 championship season had something to do with that, as the Bulldogs derailed Kelly’s 2022 Tigers, 50-30 in the SEC title game, knocking Jayden Daniels out of action at the end of the first half with the game in hand, leading 35-10.

Daniels won the Heisman Trophy at LSU in 2023, but the Tigers fell short of making what was then a four-team College Football Playoff field with losses to eventual ACC champ and No. 8-ranked Florida State (45-24), at then-No. 20 Ole Miss (55-49) and at No. 8 Alabama (42-28).

The 2024 season was perhaps more damning for Kelly, LSU finishing 8-4 and missing the 12-team CFP field with losses to No. 23 Florida State (27-20), at No. 14 Texas A&M (38-23), at home to No. 11 Alabama (42-13) and then at Florida, 27-16.

Kelly secured the No. 2-ranked portal class leading into the 2025 campaign, and hopes were high, particularly after a season-opening 17-10 road win at then-No. 4 Clemson.

Losses in three of the past four games, however — all against currently Top 10-ranked teams, Ole Miss, Vanderbilt and Texas A&M — proved enough to get Kelly fired.

High expectations, indeed.

“It’s the world we live in, everybody’s got a voice, everybody listens to somebody,” Smart said, referring to the power wielded by high-dollar donors bankrolling programs in today’s NIL era.

“It’s obviously a tough situation on everybody, let’s be honest. Players dealing with it, fans dealing with it, coaches dealing with it at this time in the middle of a season.”

NCAA rules allow for players to have a 30-day window to enter the portal after a coach firing, which began on Monday at LSU.

The universal transfer portal window for football is set for Jan. 2-16, and the Tigers — one of seven Power 4 programs who have fired their coach in this season — will have their work cut out retaining talent.

It’s possible — though not very likely — LSU could still make the 12-team College Football Playoff by winning out and earning an at-large bid.

The expanded playoffs, once thought by some to provide coaches with a wider margin for error, have had the opposite effect in the SEC.

Smart indicated many programs, particularly the more tradition-laden, have an expectation of making the 12-team field even amid the SEC’s unprecedented parity and depth of the past two seasons.

“I think there’s so much built around the playoffs, and everything’s boom or bust,” Smart said. “You can’t have a normal season.

“People have to make decisions earlier based on how somebody does ....”

Indeed, Smart explained earlier in the month the general philosophy that the earlier a coach is fired, the more time it will give a program to maintain the current roster and work toward building a new one.

LSU, with its dominant status in a state loaded with elite prospects, is considered one of the top coaching jobs in the nation. Recent championship trends provide evidence of why that is the case.

Nick Saban awakened an LSU program many felt was a sleeping giant by winning the 2003 national championship, and his successor, Les Miles, followed suit by winning the national championship in 2007.

Ed Orgeron, who was promoted from LSU’s defensive line coach position to succeed Miles in 2016 as the interim head coach, won six of the final eight games that season to secure the position en route to winning the national title in 2019.

LSU, as Woodward noted, expected Kelly to become the fourth consecutive coach in the program to win a national title.