In an opening statement that lasted 16 minutes on the final day of SEC Media Days, LSU Head Coach Lane Kiffin spoke on a wide variety of things.
They ranged from it being the first time Media Days has been held in Tampa and his family ties there to LSU’s NIL deals to LSU’s roster being built with elite high school and transfer portal players to him no longer being on social media to the nine-game SEC schedule.
And, of course, he talked about the high expectations that comes with being the head coach at LSU.
“I’ve just kind of — you follow my life. I’ve built my life out of pushing out of comfort. That may not be for everybody. That’s fine. That’s just how I am. This job has really pushed me out of comfort to take a new job, to be at LSU. Like everyone talks about, the pressure of LSU and what comes with that.
“And there is more things to be done as the head coach of LSU than anywhere I have been that are asked of me. I’ve really enjoyed that. It’s been exciting to do that and to rebuild within a program a roster and to come in and come off of a 7-6 season and then the expectations that everybody in the media has that we’re supposed to be this great team right away. That’s an awesome challenge.
“You want to talk about getting uncomfortable. That does it. Expectations make you uncomfortable. They make you not be able to just go through motions in any aspect of your program. So that’s been awesome.”
Kiffin has been on the job for seven months. He talked about the “blueprint of what we’re building.”
“We’re coming to LSU to sign the best players in the country out of high school and then mix that with the best portal players in the country and put them together.
“That’s led us into this roster that we have now, which is a really good mixture of that. You have some elite high school players we just signed, some of the best D-linemen in America that will be true freshmen, and then some elite portal first-round portal players coming in and that combination.
“That roster is exciting to work with. I can’t wait to get to the field, get back to fall camp to do that. But it also excites me about the future of LSU, too. Not just this year.
“We’ve put together a roster that can win now, but as I look at when you build the program, where it really will go to another level is how you build your depth, and that you can’t necessarily build the first year, but then you can once you sign the high school players and back-to-back classes and portal
With the nine-game conference schedule, Kiffin lamented the loss off non-conference games.
“Teams will eventually get out of the bigger nonconference games because the selection process is not fixed. Until that is fixed to really truly reward strength of schedule, I was against it because I think what you’re going to have is more conference losses. You don’t prove anything.
“If I would keep playing — we’re all in the same conference. We keep playing each other. We don’t really prove that we’re better than anyone else, and we’re taking away out-of-conference games. I just think that it’s going to cause issues that we’ve already seen.
“Until we can get into a world where people can actually look at teams and say that team that is 9-3 with their schedule is a better team than that 11-1 in a different conference, which now I think we aren’t even close to doing that, I think it causes a problem because we don’t have enough nonconference in our sport.”