Brian Kelly Paid a Cool 52 Million to Not Do His Job

29 October 2025

Let me preface this by saying that I have never been a fan of the LSU Tigers football team. The Tigers are a bandwagon team. My hometown of Shreveport has closer D1 college football programs to support, but LSU is the team with all the money, hence it is the team with the greatest number of winning records and most consistency in achieving them. The Tigers are also a key component of middle class morale in Louisiana. When the Tigers are doing good, middle class Louisianans are happy. Support for the Tigers in Shreveport is a hallmark of middle class conformity. I am a revolutionary defeatist, so I root for the Razorbacks.

Then shouldn’t I be gleeful that the Tigers are having a “bad” season, forcing head coach Brian Kelly out after a humiliating loss to Texas A&M? Let’s be real. Brian Kelly may not have been working in a way that justified his paycheck, but LSU still has a winning team, and will likely finish the season with a winning record despite his firing. The Arkansas Razorbacks under the formerly disgraced interim coach Bobby Petrino is having an actually bad season, 0-4 in conference and 2-6 overall. Former head coach Sam Pittman was already fired back in September for this dismal record. From over here, a 5-3 record looks just peachy.

The issue, however, is that LSU paid Brian Kelly not just for a winning record, but for playoff wins, national championships, at the very least a prominent bowl game. Last year’s Texas Bowl victory was too provincial to inspire the fanbase, and the Tigers are projected to wind up there again. LSU fans are hard to please, being used to winning records, and LSU tickets don’t sell so good when the team isn’t winning.

To make matters worse, and as if to emphasize the political stakes at play, governor Jeff Landry has inserted himself prominently in the hunt for a new LSU head coach. This trademark Landry buffoonery could easily backfire. After all, any new head coach will be subject to extensive and inexplicable political interference from the governor’s mansion, and will have to be willing to put up with that.

Landry has been making a habit of interfering at LSU. As governor, he’s free to place cronies on LSU’s Board of Supervisors. He recently demanded the erection of a statue of a deceased reactionary media freak on LSU’s campus, and attempted to get the ailing Mike the Tiger, the actual tiger, to make appearances at LSU home games. Landry sort of got his way on that last one, hiring a rent-a-tiger from Florida named Omar to parade around in lieu of Mike. Landry, certainly a superstitious man, did not try this stunt again after the Tigers lost the game Omar appeared at.

Landry has said that the next coach will not be selected by the LSU Athletics Director. Instead, his Board of Supervisors will. Landry had a role to play in Kelly’s firing, and in response to Kelly’s buy-out, said “I’m tired of rewarding failure in this country”, after rewarding Kelly with $52 million. The next LSU head coach will be under immense pressure to succeed, and Landry will pay a big reputational cost if The Tigers’ performance doesn’t improve. The current leading candidate for head coach, Tulane’s Jon Sumrall, might decide that it’s better to lay low at Tulane, whose program he’s turned into a powerhouse, than be subject to the whims of Jeff Landry.

The LSU head coach is the highest paid public official in the state. Brian Kelly’s salary in 2025 was $10,175,000. He’ll be paid over $52,000,000 to not do his job. If I were him, I’d be the happiest person in the state: out of Landry’s grasp, $52 million richer, and never having to work again.