Brian Kelly on LSU firing: 'I didn’t win enough games, period.' What's next?

Injury preceded insult. Brian Kelly was steamrolled not once but twice as he stalked the sidelines in 2025 as LSU football coach, colliding with an official in his team’s opening win at Clemson and again in a Game 3 win against Florida. He would notch just two more wins as top Tiger.

By late October, the insult arrived: Kelly was fired Oct. 26, 2025 — the only time in a coaching career that's spanned parts of five decades Kelly saw someone else dictate his coaching coordinates. Since that time, the 64-year-old Kelly — Notre Dame’s all-time winningest coach before he bolted for the bayou after the 2021 regular season — largely has avoided public comment, or the spotlight.

For one thing, Kelly’s been rehabilitating the torn labrum he suffered Sept. 13 when 6-7, 317-pound tackle Weston Davis finished blocking his Florida defender all the way through his head coach on the LSU sideline. “I didn’t have the surgery done, went with an alternative way of doing it with stem-cell (therapy) and peptides,” Kelly exclusively told USA TODAY Sports in a wide-ranging interview.

“... The most conventional way was to get it done with surgery. But, after what happened at LSU and I was out of a job, the last thing you want to do is be stuck in a sling.