Brian Kelly open to facing another team in future spring practice

This spring, there was a brief push to begin having joint practices and even playing exhibition games between two schools. While nothing amounted of it for the 2025 season, it got many people talking, and several coaches like LSU head coach Brian Kelly even shared that they’d be open to it.

While Kelly has an interest in facing another team in the spring, he also sees challenges. After all, different teams are operating on different timelines throughout the spring.

“I would be open to it,” Brian Kelly said. “I think there’s — clearly, the calendar dictates a lot of this, right? We work off of an academic calendar relative to recruiting, relative to different schools being on quarters versus being on semesters. So, there’s a lot of things that would have to kind of come together in those situations.”

This comes in an offseason where much has been made about spring games. Several schools canceled or came out with major reworkings of their spring games, either due to the length of last year’s postseason or to avoid potential tampering. Joint scrimmages would certainly go against that idea and bring even more national visibility to a program but would also help drum up attention for both teams involved.

“What I would say about it is that in years past, it was a dream,” Kelly said. “I think it’s within our grasp now. I think there needs to be some more attention to particular rules that make that difficult. But I think we’re on the course towards that happening.”

Brian Kelly did add another caveat from there. He’d want it to operate relatively similar to how some NFL teams handle preseason games by also having joint practices. Kelly also made it sound like he’d want to keep it relatively local to Louisiana. That would, ultimately, limit the amount of teams who LSU would be able to have this kind of spring practice with.

“Well, I would prefer if we were to do some things like a game,” Kelly said. “That we could do some joint practices with some of our neighbors in the state of Louisiana.”

It was Colorado head coach Deion Sanders who got the conversation about playing another team started. He quickly found a taker in Syracuse. There, head coach Fran Brown seemed to love the opportunity to compete. There was just one problem, the NCAA wasn’t having it.

The NCAA denied a waiver to allow that game to happen. So, for the time being, it would seem that Brian Kelly, Deion Sanders, and any other coach who wants joint practices or a spring scrimmage will have to wait for the NCAA to change its feelings on the matter too.