Let's Dance - SI longform article on Brian Kelly to LSU

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“We rednecks can cook, too, at least some of us,” Bull Campbell says in his Southern twang. “We had a few beers. They stayed for about 90 minutes, long enough to eat up some étouffée.”
Campbell escorted Kelly to his backyard, where a group of neighborhood kids was playing tackle football. Bull gestured toward them and looked at Kelly, “This is Louisiana,” he told him.
“Dad is cooking crawfish, and kids are playing football,” Kelly recalls. “Food, family and football. All the things we’re looking for, we got in that family. The education and adjustment for me has been really cool. It hasn’t been a culture shock like, ‘Oh, my God, this is crazy!’ It’s been much more like, ‘This is cool.’”
When he returned to Baton Rouge, an elated Kelly phoned his wife to retell the story of the gigantic man cooking a roux and kids outside playing football in 50-degree temperatures in December.
“This,” he told her, “is going to work out really well.”

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??Just paces from the entrance to LSU’s football operations building, a sleek, black Tesla sits in the spot reserved for Kelly. It is decidedly different from what previously occupied the space, a gas-guzzling Denali or Hummer driven by Orgeron. Stripped from the facility’s walls are any references to Orgeron’s oft-used slogan, “One Team One Heartbeat.” Within the building’s offices, Kelly cleaned house—excluding equipment and athletic trainers, he kept fewer than five staff members and hired 48 new ones. Kelly even reconfigured the head coach’s suite, shifting furniture around so his desk now sits in an area the previous coach used as a weight room—more evidence of the disparity between the two men.

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Kelly preaches “standards” instead of “culture.” He is tightening up the program, using a business-like approach that partially stems from his past life as a political campaign aide, not necessarily the quintessential football guy like LSU’s past two coaches. One player recently jammed to loud music while strutting down the facility’s hallways. “Better turn that down,” a staff member warned him. “We don’t do that here anymore.” A few players who were late for Kelly’s first team meeting and for winter workouts are no longer on the team.

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“Everyone is like, ‘Aw, it’s going to be this white guy from the Midwest going down there and it’s going to be crazy!’” Kelly says. “There’s a little more spice to the food, maybe a little bit more roux than I’m used to, but it hasn’t really been an adjustment that I’ve felt like this is really outside of my comfort zone.”

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“If Coach Kelly wins, they’re going to embrace him like Nick Saban. Nick Saban is from West Virginia and coached at Michigan State before he got [to LSU],” says Bobby Hebert, a bayou-bred Louisianian and sports talk-show host in New Orleans. “If he doesn’t win,” Herbert says in his Cajun twang, “they’ll tell him, ‘Yankee, go home!’”

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And Kelly’s first couple of months in Baton Rouge have provided more fuel to that fire of curiosity. First, the way he pronounced the word family (FAM-uh-lee) during a speech at an LSU basketball game with a sudden Southern tinge. Kelly says the accent debacle was blown out of proportion and that he normally pronounces the word that way.

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And what of the dancing with tight end recruit Danny Lewis on a spinning apparatus, the coach awkwardly squatting and using moves from the movie Pulp Fiction? The kid wanted to dance, Kelly says. What good recruiter declines such a request from a recruit? (Lewis wound up signing with … Alabama.)

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“Now, I know I’m a sh---y dancer, but it’s not for anybody else except the kid,” Kelly says. “It’s for them. I don’t really care what other people are thinking, as long as that kid was having fun with it. Now it’s like every kid who comes on campus says, ‘Coach, you gonna dance?! Are we dancin’?!’ I say, ‘Only if you’re committin’.’”

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“Ed Orgeron and Les Miles—no disrespect to them, but he’s a better coach than them and they won national championships there,” former Notre Dame quarterback Brady Quinn says. “I just hope he can drop the Southern accent and stop the dancing with recruits.”

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