By RYNE BERTHELOT, Journal Sports
BATON ROUGE – Two days removed from a regrettable debut to his coaching career at LSU, Brian Kelly knows how long the laundry list of improvements is.
“There’s so many things that I could stand here in front of you that in Week 1 we want to do better,” Kelly said during his press conference Tuesday. “I could touch upon every single aspect of the game, but I think we have to be careful not to say that this defines anything about this football team other than what they displayed. They displayed great grit. They displayed character. They love playing for LSU and in the end, they battled their tails off.”
The 24-23 loss in the Caesar’s Superdome to Florida State Sunday night wasn’t from a lack of effort, especially during the tail end of the fourth quarter: Daniels threw for 14 completions and 119 of his 209 total passing yards in the game’s final frame, while LSU’s defense limited Jordan Travis to just 48 passing yards.
There was one player who was noticeably lethargic during the opener, though: Preseason All-American Kayshon Boutte, who finished his night with two catches for 20 yards, a pair of bad drops and two missed targets in the end zone, which buried the future high NFL Draft pick behind true freshman tight end Mason Taylor and others on the stat sheet. Boutte followed up the lackluster performance by scrubbing any mention of LSU from his social media accounts but has since cleared the air with Kelly.
“You know I think there were a number of those guys that were disappointed in their play,” Kelly said. “They’re so hard on themselves, they want to succeed at such a high level. So yeah, I had a conversation with Kayshon, and his standards are so high and obviously it was a difficult day for him, it wasn’t his best. But he’s going to have great games, and it’s going to be in the totality of his work that he’s going to be evaluated.”
The Tigers have a golden opportunity to right the ship against Southern this week, but they’ll do so without Maason Smith, who Kelly confirmed will miss the rest of the season with a torn ACL he suffered on the first drive of the game. Kelly tabbed sophomore transfer Mekhi Wingo as Smith’s likely successor, thrusting the former SEC All-Freshman team member into a prominent role in the heart of LSU’s defense.
Wingo earned three starts last year as a freshman at Missouri, and finished the season with 27 tackles, two tackles for a loss, a sack, and an interception he returned 40 yards for a touchdown. He even led the Tigers’ Summer/Spring Accountability Team (SWAT) in points, a system that Kelly devised where team captains “draft” their teammates to improve accountability.
“He’s a terrific leader,” Kelly said about Wingo. “He played very well in the game; he’s active. It’s hard to compare anybody to Maason Smith with his size and his athleticism. But Mekhi Wingo is going to be Mekhi Wingo, and what he does is extremely effective as a football player, and obviously now he gets a bigger share of that work.”
Contact Ryne Berthelot at rgberthelot@gmail.com