How Brian Kelly’s Former Notre Dame Assistants Helped End His LSU Tenure

As the 2024 college football season drew to a close, the contrast between the LSU Tigers fading from Playoff consideration and dismissing Brian Kelly while Notre Dame built momentum to an eventual National Championship Game run.

It’s perhaps fitting, then, that the nadir of the Kelly era at LSU came in back-to-back losses to former Kelly assistants under the Golden Dome.

First up in Week 8 was Clark Lea, head coach of a Vanderbilt team that, if it weren’t for Indiana, would be the most shocking Playoff hopeful from a historical perspective.

Lea spent four seasons on Kelly’s staff at Notre Dame, including two as defensive coordinator that resulted in the Fighting Irish reaching the four-team version of the Playoff.

Such a resume would seemingly have earned him a more high-profile opportunity than landing a Vanderbilt, a proverbial coaching graveyard. Although a regular College World Series contender in baseball, the Commodores’ presence in SEC football has long seemed to serve mostly as a way to boost the conference’s collective GPA — and to give opponents a Homecoming weekend cupcake.

But Vanderbilt following up its 31-24 win over Kelly and the Tigers on Oct. 18 with a 17-10 defeat of a top 20-ranked Missouri has the Commodores heading into November very much in the thick of the Playoff chase.

Before LSU lost to Vanderbilt, Kelly offered effusive praise of his former defensive coordinator to media, coincidentally noting the challenge of continuing to build against outside pressure.

“it’s easy to listen to the noise and go away from what your vision is for your program. Clark has never swayed from what the vision is that he had and the vision that he painted for everybody else there,” Kelly said.

Lea took over the Notre Dame defense from Mike Elko, who spent just one season with Kelly at Notre Dame. After a career that included stints at his alma Penn, Fordham, Richmond and a now-defunct Hofstra program, Elko shaved a touchdown off of the Fighting Irish’s point-per-game yield from 2016 to 2017.

That was enough to impress Jimbo Fisher, who had deep reserves to turn Texas A&M into a national championship contender. Fisher’s instincts that Elko could contribute to establishing a title team proved correct — though he presumably did not envision it being with Elko at the helm.

Elko’s success as head coach a Duke, a program comparable to Vanderbilt, led him back to Texas A&M in Fisher’s former post. Elko now oversees an Aggies team that will head into its final, four-game stretch at 8-0 and ranked in the top three nationally.

A&M’s most emphatic statements of the 2025 season have come so far in a late-game touchdown at Notre Dame in Week 3, and in Saturday’s romp of LSU in the once-feared Death Valley.

Fans who remained at Tiger Stadium for the late-game stretches of a 49-25 Texas A&M blowout of LSU on Saturday broke into chants of “fire Kelly” loud enough that the coach had to comment in his postgame press conference.

Before LSU pulled the plug the next day, Kelly accurately noted that the decision is “out of [his] hands.”

The choice to move on comes down to those responsible for pulling together an astronomical $52.4 million buyout of Kelly’s contract, a proposition that feels less daunting after Penn State decision-makers ponied up a similar figure to oust the more successful James Franklin.

Ironically, the LSU brass coming up with the funds to buy Kelly out would support one of the coach’s more famed comments on why he took the job after more than a decade at Notre Dame.

In 2022 before his first season with the Tigers, Kelly touted SEC programs’ willingness to do whatever they felt necessary to pursue national championships. That inherently means spend sums of money that in other corners of the collegiate ecosystem sound obscene.

To be sure, public sentiment that expansion of both the SEC and a Big Ten Conference home to Penn State and reigning national champion Ohio State transformed college football into a Big Two structure is proving true.

Having resources that align with national championship expectations allows a coach to hire away standout coordinators, as happened with Kelly’s successful Notre Dame teams and his former Irish assistants. It also means competing with those similarly dedicated programs every week.