When Brian Kelly jumped to LSU from Notre Dame in 2021, the expectations were simple– win a national championship, just like LSU’s three previous coaches. Less than four years in, with a 34-14 record, that ship has drowned. Unfortunately, with it, quarterback Garrett Nussemeier has also gone down, along with the current Syracuse backup QB, Rickie Collins.

“We’re gonna get two more guys off the portal, and we’ve got a really good high school kid coming in. We’ve gotta get some guys that are ready to come in and play right away,” Syracuse head coach Fran Brown said on Cuse Sports Talk, essentially writing Collins’ Syracuse obituary before the season even ended.​​

After flipping from Purdue, Collins came to Baton Rouge as a highly-touted four-star recruit in hopes of eventually running Brian Kelly’s offense. Instead, he spent two seasons buried on the depth chart behind Jayden Daniels and Garrett Nussmeier. Collins transferred to Syracuse in December 2024, won the starting quarterback job in Spring Camp, and looked poised to get his shot…

Until the coaching staff brought in Notre Dame transfer Steve Angeli.

Collins lost the job to Angeli in fall camp. He briefly regained it when Angeli suffered a season-ending Achilles injury, then proceeded to go 0-4 as the starter while struggling badly enough that Brown benched him mid-game against North Carolina.

Now Angeli is locked in as Syracuse’s 2026 starter. With that, Collins is staring at another backup role or potentially his second transfer in as many years, with Brown ensuring he’s moving on from the Collins experiment.

Brian Kelly’s fingerprints are all over this disaster.

Collins was the 18th-best quarterback in the 2023 recruiting cycle and a former four-star prospect coming out of Woodlawn High School, Baton Rouge. However, always being the third string, he couldn’t unleash his potential.

During his true freshman campaign in 2023, he appeared in only one game to complete two passes for 19 yards. In all, his LSU career wrapped up with only 38 passing yards and 37 rushing yards over two seasons, despite Kelly stating that he is very much in the mix of the three-quarterback room. But that growth never materialized.

He had to eventually move on from the Tigers only to realize he wasn’t developed enough to hold onto a starting job against a backup from Notre Dame. 

While it wasn’t the exact case with Nussmeier, he will live with similar consequences.

In his junior year, the starting quarterback led the Tigers to an 8-4 record and a trip to the Texas Bowl. He threw for 3,739 yards in 2024, the sixth most of any quarterback in college football, along with 26 touchdowns. NFL scouts took notice, with some mock drafts listing Nussmeier in the top couple of rounds. However, with Kelly’s re-recruitment of the quarterback, he ditched the NFL Draft and returned to Baton Rouge for his senior campaign. And that’s where everything went down.

Nussmeier, who should be preparing for the NFL Draft as a Heisman contender, is instead playing through injuries on a dysfunctional offense that ranks last in the SEC in nearly every meaningful category. Making matters worse for him is the fact that his personal numbers have taken a dip as well:

For Kelly, it goes far beyond just quarterback development. It’s a systematic failure of talent evaluation, staff management, and offensive philosophy that’s torpedoed LSU’s entire program. 

Kelly has cycled through coordinators as if they were disposable. He lost Mike Denbrock to Notre Dame after 2023. He then promoted quarterbacks coach Joe Sloan to co-offensive coordinator and playcaller. The move proved to be one of the worst mistakes. The Tigers went from leading the SEC in scoring under Denbrock (45.5 points per game) to 106th in scoring offense, averaging just 25.5 points under Sloan. 

Kelly’s expensive transfer portal hauls (blue-chip receivers like Barion Brown and Nic Anderson, veteran offensive linemen Braelin Moore and Josh Thompson) have been more solid than spectacular. He has failed to transform an offense that’s supposed to be competing for College Football Playoff spots.

LSU spent $18 million assembling a roster built around a potential first-round quarterback and top-tier talent. And Kelly couldn’t crack 25 points against FBS competition for the first three weeks of the season.​

Kelly never could find the right mix of coordinators. He couldn’t get his high-priced portal additions to gel, and left Nussmeier to operate behind an offensive line that collapsed under pressure.

The Brian Kelly era at LSU has become a cautionary tale about what happens when a program sells its soul for a big-name hire and gets diminishing returns every single year.

Kelly went 34-14 through his first four seasons without making the College Football Playoff once. He never had fewer than three losses in any campaign and was fired in October with a buyout that will be among the most expensive decisions in college football. 

Interim coach Frank Wilson has pledged that Nussmeier will remain the starter, but the damage is already done. For two quarterbacks who arrived in Baton Rouge with NFL dreams, Brian Kelly’s tenure has been nothing short of a career-killing nightmare.​

The $54 million legal war is making things worse

As if ruining quarterback careers and torpedoing LSU’s program wasn’t enough damage for one tenure, Brian Kelly is now embroiled in a legal battle with the university. Kelly’s attorneys sent LSU a scathing letter claiming the school’s refusal to confirm he was fired “without cause” has tanked his chances of securing another coaching job during this critical hiring period. 

“As you know, there is absolutely no basis to LSU’s contrived positions that Coach Kelly was not terminated, or that a cause existed for such termination,” the letter stated. “LSU’s conduct, including its failure to confirm that Coach Kelly was terminated without cause and its unsupported allegations of misconduct on the part of Coach Kelly, has made it nearly impossible for Coach Kelly to secure other football-related employment.”

LSU is playing games with the semantics, insisting it hasn’t “formally terminated” Kelly and dangling the possibility they could fire him “for cause” to dodge the buyout altogether. 

It’s a fitting final act for a coach who left a trail of chaos in his wake. Even his exit from Baton Rouge has become a dysfunctional mess that’s damaging everyone involved.​