Bill Connelly dismisses idea LSU is bigger contender than Alabama in 2023

After beating Alabama and playing for the SEC Championship in Brian Kelly’s first season at LSU, there are high expectations for the Tigers moving forward. Some people even think that LSU will be a bigger contender than Alabama in 2023, though Bill Connelly is not among them.

Bill Connelly, a college football writer for ESPN, explained why he still thinks Alabama should be a bigger contender than LSU in 2023 on the Paul Finebaum Show.

“I don’t think I do,” Bill Connelly told Paul Finebuam. “I mean, Alabama still recruits like Alabama and obviously we’re going to see some coordinator change. We’re going to see a quarterback change.”

Bill Connelly then pointed out how highly SP+ still considers Alabama. SP+ is the analytical metric that Connelly designed himself and is “a tempo- and opponent-adjusted measure of college football efficiency,” according to Connelly.

“Obviously, there are plenty of opportunities for them to fall a little bit, but my SP+ rankings, they haven’t ranked below like third in like 15 years. Until they fall off, maybe they’re not Georgia anymore or at this point maybe Georgia really is the single biggest power in sport, but I don’t know how we could think of Alabama as anything but number two or number three until they prove otherwise because they still have it,” Connelly continued.

“They proved against Kansas State at the end of the year. Their ceiling was still ridiculously high, even if they were more inconsistent than normal this year. I just can’t see it. I think they’re easily number two or three overall. And LSU could be top 10, but they have a couple more steps to take, I think.”

Brian Kelly on what will stand out about year one

After the season ended, LSU head coach Brian Kelly spoke about what stood out to him in his first season with the Tigers.

“Probably the relationships with the players, and developing new relationships with 115 players Getting to know them. That — to me, in Year 1, the first time here — you don’t know any of the players, and they don’t know you. I think that press conference — our first meeting, said, ‘Hey, we’re going to build trust, but it’s going to take time, for both sides,'” Brian Kelly said.

“I think that that’s what happened. I’ll remember that in Year 1. The process of building trust”