Brian Kelly addresses LSU's tendency to chase plays on defense

LSU head coach Brian Kelly has his team out to a 3-1 start after the first four weeks of the 2023 college football season. But there is still room for improvement in all phases of the game, and there is one thing on the defensie side that he thinks can help unlock it.

He talked during Monday’s press conference ahead of this week’s game versus Ole Miss about each player on defense doing their job and trying to stay on task with their assignments.

“We have to do the ordinary things extraordinarily well,” Kelly said. “I know that’s an overused cliché that we hear so many times. But we’re having a tendency of trying to chase too many plays on defense. What I mean by that: we’re trying to make plays that are really not our plays to make, and we just need to do our job. I think once we settle down and just do the ordinary things extraordinarily well this can be a really good defense because it’s shown itself to have resiliency and toughness and the players necessary to do that.”

The LSU defense is allowing 360.3 yards per game while holding opponents to a 44.2% third-down conversion percentage. However, they are allowing their opponents to average 25 points per game.

Linebacker Harold Perkins, who entered the season as arguably the best defender in the country, has 16 tackles, 3.5 tackles for loss, two sacks, three pass breakups and two forced fumbles. Major Burns leads the team with 27 total tackles.

Kelly also said that he thinks the players he has currently playing on the LSU defense will be the ones who continue to play the rest of the season. The only exceptions would be players currently injured like Omar Speights.

“I don’t think there’s anybody else that we would bring into the game,” Kelly said. “We’d like to get obviously everybody healthy. Getting all the guys out there physically. Speights, obviously, is one guy that we’d like to get back out on the field. I think there’s some other tweaks that we can do defensively to see that we get guys in the right position and let them influence the game accordingly. There’s not another guy that, let’s take a redshirt off a particular player or another guy that’s going to get in the rotation. You might see some players play a little bit more.”