LSU football recruiting has "wider net" than Notre Dame, according to Brian Kelly
Brian Kelly still isn't done pointing out the ways that LSU is a better football program than Notre Dame as he embarks on his first year in the SEC.
This time, the first-year Tigers coach is focusing on recruiting. Kelly says that looking for talent in Louisiana and the Southeast will make his job much easier than it was over the previous decade luring players to Notre Dame.
LSU casts a "larger net"
"I would say we can cast a larger net in terms of recruitment, there's no doubt about that," Kelly said.
"We're talking about 35,000 students... 8,000 small Catholic school [speaking about Notre Dame]. I still want young men that value a degree and have the right traits, so there's going to be some similarities relative to the young men I want to recruit to LSU.
"There's going to be a larger profile that allows me to recruit more student-athletes that I couldn't recruit at Notre Dame.
"From a recruiting standpoint, the state of Louisiana offers us so much more relative to the ability to stay in state and really pull a lot of our players right from the state. We weren't going to do that in Indiana. We had to go to California, Texas, we had to be on the East Coast in New Jersey and the coastal areas.
"That's probably the biggest difference between the two schools. We can stay in the state of Louisiana and cast a wider net."
Notre Dame was close, but never quite made it
Kelly recruited well enough at Notre Dame with that more national focus, helping revive the program back into a national contender, playing in a BCS national championship game and earning two College Football Playoff berths.
But the coach would probably point to a marked talent discrepancy on the field in all three of those games. Notre Dame lost to Alabama, 42-14, in the 2013 national title match, in a 30-3 CFP semifinal rout to Clemson, and to the Tide again in a 31-14 Rose Bowl CFP semifinal game.
Kelly feels he has the coaching acumen to contend for a national championship, but has lacked the on-field talent up to this point.
Kelly improved LSU's recruiting fortunes in his first time out this offseason, signing 5-star linebacker Harold Perkins and 4-star quarterback Walker Howard, two of the highest-rated players at their respective positions. LSU also signed more than a dozen transfer players, including Arizona State quarterback Jayden Daniels.
Kelly opening up about Notre Dame issues
This isn't the first time the coach has gone public about what he thinks are crucial differences between his old school and his new gig.
In recent remarks, Kelly pointed out what he felt was a lack of proper investment at Notre Dame into the athletic program, including the nutritional program for players.
"I felt like I did everything that I could at Notre Dame and they felt like they did everything they could for me," Kelly said.
"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. Okay? And so here we are."
Kelly said he made frequent requests to Notre Dame to increase their resource investment into the football team and to make improvements around the athletic center, but that the school never followed up on them.
LSU has been up and down recently
It's been an eventful 21st century for the LSU football program. Always one of the top recruiting powers in the SEC, the school has won three national championships since 2000, with each of its last three head coaches going all the way. Nick Saban won the BCS national title in 2003, followed by Les Miles in 2007, and Ed Orgeron helped LSU to a 15-0 mark and College Football Playoff title in 2019.
(h/t Rich Eisen Show)
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