After its third loss in its last four games, LSU finally pulled the plug and fired former football coach Brian Kelly. The move was surprising to some, but not to college football analyst Josh Pate, who saw it coming a mile away.
Pate claimed that Kelly has been “checked out” of LSU for years on Monday's edition of ‘Josh Pate's College Football Show.' The analyst noted that Kelly remained committed to the team during the season, but allegedly failed to stay on task during the offseason.
“I cooled on him a couple of years ago because I kind of found out what the inner workings were about him down there,” Pate said. “He was checked out, he was totally checked out. Now, I don't mean that in the kind of way that a teacher is checked out the last two weeks of spring semester when she knows she's about to retire. A college football coach checked out is still working a ton of hours, so I don’t mean it like that. But in the most critical parts of roster construction season there, this dude was on a beach. And it never really got talked about publicly.”
Pate specifically accused Kelly of “being on the beach” instead of recruiting. He added that Kelly knew “very little” about some of the players his team recruited, or the staff members that it hired.
“The guy is on a beach in Florida when a lot of the most critical periods of the calendar are going on, and there are other folks just grinding away in that building. In some cases, you're landing kids he knows very little about. They added staffers that in some cases he didn’t know a ton about.”
Criticism of former LSU head football coach Brian Kelly
Pate's claims are not the first to accuse Kelly of taking it easy over the summer. Barstool Sports made a similar report accusing the 64-year-old of spending much of his time golfing instead of in the office.
Fans particularly piled on Kelly when he lost Bryce Underwood, the top recruit of the class of 2025. Of course, it would not have been easy to keep Underwood after Michigan's alleged $10 million NIL offer, but the move demonstrated to fans how careless Kelly was as a recruiter.
Kelly's tenure ends with a 34-14 record over five years in Baton Rouge. He managed just two 10-win seasons with the team while failing to get LSU to the College Football Playoffs in each of his five seasons.
