Brian Kelly spent more than four decades on the coaching side of college football. On Saturday, he tried something completely different. The former LSU and Notre Dame coach climbed into the CBS Sports Network booth for the first time, joining Rich Waltz, Adam Breneman, and sideline reporter Jordan Giorgio for Jacksonville State’s visit to North Dakota State.
Watch What’s Trending Now!
The broadcast opened with Waltz welcoming viewers to Fargo and introducing Kelly. The former LSU head coach admitted the booth gave him a completely different perspective after spending roughly 30 years on the sideline.
“Well, I’m excited because I got a new view at this game. It’s been in a box for 30 years on the sideline. So this is awesome,” Kelly said. That was enough to get social media going. One viewer summed up the mood bluntly on X.
“So strange lol. Most hated guy in college football arguably of all time,” wrote the X user. Another went straight after Kelly’s ability to call a game: “Brian Kelly has to be the worst voice calling a game,” the user wrote.
LSU fired Kelly last October after the Tigers stumbled midway through the 2025 campaign. That came on the heels of Kelly never making the playoffs during his LSU tenure. The program later hired Lane Kiffin from Ole Miss.
However, the Tigers remain responsible for Kelly’s buyout, which is worth more than $50 million, with the final figure reported at around $54 million. His CBS job can help offset some of that money under his contract, although it is obviously nowhere near the size of his former coaching salary. That led to another jab.
One viewer took a shot at Kelly’s unusual financial situation, writing, “The highest paid announcer, but his paycheck is not coming from announcing.” The accent jokes came almost immediately after that. Another fan asked, “How many accents will Brian Kelly imitate in the next 3 hours?”
That one goes back to Kelly’s first days at LSU. During his 2021 introduction, fans noticed that his voice sounded very different from the one they had heard at Notre Dame. Kelly had adopted a Southern accent to please the fans. The clip spread quickly, and the accent became one of the running jokes around Kelly. Five years later, fans are still using it against him during his first game in the booth. The joke has never really disappeared.
The irony is that the actual broadcast was not the disaster some fans wanted it to be. Kelly had some good moments. He spoke about game management, coaching decisions, and what he saw from the teams. When the stadium clock had problems, he explained how he would have handled it as a coach. He also made one very Brian Kelly-style observation about soccer, complaining about the amount of flopping.
“I don’t mean this in any disrespectful manner to the game of soccer. I loved it. We all watched it, right?” Kelly said. “As our team was doing well. But there’s a lot of flopping going on out here right now. So, we’ve got to clean that up.”
The bigger problem for Kelly is that being a good coach and being a good television analyst are two different jobs. He was also working in a three-person booth, meaning he had to find his place alongside Waltz and Breneman instead of controlling the conversation the way he once controlled a press conference or a locker room. Nevertheless, many are still not used to seeing Kelly in his new role.
“Can’t stand looking at him, much less listening to him,” one X user wrote.
The game itself did not help create much drama. North Dakota State handled Jacksonville State 33-7 in the Bison’s first game as an FBS program. By the end, Kelly seemed to understand that he still had some work to do. He thanked Waltz and Breneman and admitted he would have to improve if he wanted to keep up with them. That probably was the fairest assessment of the night.