Brian Kelly defends 2022 comments about leaving Notre Dame for LSU

Following his 12th season at Notre Dame in 2021, head coach Brian Kelly shocked the college football world when he jumped ship to LSU, following the firing of National Championship winning head coach Ed Orgeron.

Kelly had just led the Irish to five consecutive 10-win seasons, leaving many questions about the late-career move for the Massachusetts native. These questions were answered in an interview with the Associated Press, just before his first spring practice at LSU in 2022.

“It’s been awesome because you’ve got incredible facilities, you’ve got players that want to be great,” Kelly told The AP. “I want to be in an environment where I have the resources to win a national championship. And I came down here because I want to be in the American League East.

“I felt like I did everything that I could at Notre Dame and they felt like they did everything they could for me. I felt like we had both got to a point where this is what they could do, right? This is what I did. And we couldn’t get past that. OK? And so here we are. I loved my time at Notre Dame. We were on different paths and that’s fine. I’m fine with that.”

Kelly’s tenure at LSU did not quite go as planned, as the Tigers didn’t come anywhere near a National Championship. In his three full seasons with the program, LSU did not reach the College Football Playoff, and finished in the top-15 of the final CFP Rankings just once (No. 12 in 2023). Following a 5-3 start to the 2025 season, his fourth at LSU, Kelly was fired.

Brian Kelly addresses comments about departing Notre Dame for ‘resources to win a national championship’ at LSU

On Friday, Kelly addressed his 2022 comments on Sirius XM’s Dusty and Danny in the Morning. In the four seasons since Kelly’s former defensive coordinator, Marcus Freeman, was promoted to head coach in South Bend, Notre Dame boasts a 43-13 record and made a run to the National Championship game in 2024.

“This is all context. You can take what I said in any form or context and provide the right kind of answer that you want,” Kelly said. “What I said is that I would never leave Notre Dame unless I could go to a place to win a national championship. I never said you couldn’t win a national championship at Notre Dame. But when you say something like that, the context of — I was answering the question relative to, ‘what school would you go to?’ I would only go to a place where I felt like I could win a national championship.

“It wasn’t, ‘I’m leaving here because I can’t win a national championship at Notre Dame.’ But it certainly was taken that way. So, context is important. I think the people that were in that interview with me clearly understood what I was talking about. But, as you guys know, you say something on the radio, nobody’s there, they don’t hear the lead-up questions, they don’t hear the follow-up questions and they use the context they want to sell their narrative.”

Although Kelly has cleared those comments up, it’s unlikely that any Notre Dame fans will forgive him from leaving the program anytime soon. The two-time AP College Football Coach of the Year remains without a job as the calendar turns to March of the 2026 college football offseason.