It’s always a challenge to get your players in place heading into your first year at a new head coaching job.
That task is only made more difficult by the modern era of college football, which features a vastly expanded transfer portal to what we saw just a few seasons ago. For a coach like LSU’s Brian Kelly, who had a number of roster deficiencies he had to fill when he took over, there are a lot of factors to prepare for.
Though questions remain, he’s done a very impressive job rebuilding this team in a short amount of time.
“I feel comfortable,” he said, according to ESPN’s Alex Scarborough and Dave Wilson. “Look, this is my 32nd year, so you would expect that I have a pretty good idea of what the plan should be and how it should look at this point. It’s not that I’ve been just throwing balls up in the air for a long time and I’m the luckiest Irish Catholic in the history of college football.
“It’s coming together. It’s a process.”
While those needs were apparent right out of the gate, Kelly said he couldn’t afford to stress on fixing them all, opting to instead take a more pragmatic approach that will set the program up well in the long haul.
“I could not focus on all those things at one time,” he said. “I had to take much more of a longer view. If I looked at it and its immediacy, it would’ve been paralysis by analysis.”
“Paralysis by analysis” is a good way to describe the potential phenomenon that can afflict new coaches when they identify a high number of needs and become laser-focused on addressing those needs in a timely fashion. There’s nothing wrong with that, in theory, but getting an infrastructure in place to succeed should be the top priority over filling specific roster needs.
That doesn’t mean Kelly didn’t dabble in the latter, and the recruitment of quarterback Jayden Daniels emphasizes that. He said that the decision to add Daniels was one of the toughest of the offseason.
“But it was about…
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