Fish out of water? Brian Kelly rocks the college football boat at LSU

BATON ROUGE, La. — Give Brian Kelly this: He operates from a position of strength.

The man played club football at Assumption College — not FBS or FCS but club football — and one of his first jobs was coaching softball at the school. Eight years later, he climbed all the way to head football coach at Grand Valley State in Michigan, which he then leveraged into head-coaching jobs at Central Michigan and then Cincinnati and then Notre Dame. And while no one in the history of Notre Dame football had ever leveraged Notre Dame, that's exactly what he did last winter. If the administration wasn't going to make the upgrades he wanted on the timeline he wanted, fine. No hard feelings. He'd leave for LSU.

And what did he do once he got there? He let everyone on the staff go with the exception of offensive line coach Brad Davis. He even let revered strength coach Tommy Moffitt walk after a tenure that spanned the Nick Saban, Les Miles and Ed Orgeron coaching eras and included three national championships.

Kelly had a quarterback room that included blue-chip freshman Walker Howard, sophomore Garrett Nussmeier and sixth-year senior Myles Brennan. One of his first moves was convincing Brennan to withdraw from the transfer portal. But the moment Arizona State transfer Jayden Daniels became available, Kelly jumped at the chance to bring him in, knowing full well it might lead to one or more quarterbacks leaving.

He sized up Kayshon Boutte, the star receiver and perhaps the most talented player on the roster, and didn't like what he saw. Kelly wanted to know why he wasn't fully engaged in practice. It didn't matter that he was recovering from season-ending ankle surgery or that he'd flirted with transferring. Kelly called him out,