LSU Football: Chip Kelly’s biggest concern about playing the Tigers

LSU football will kick off the 2021 season on Saturday against the UCLA Bruins in Los Angeles.

Earlier this week, Bruins head coach Chip Kelly spoke to reporters about the upcoming matchup with the Tigers.

Kelly mentioned a few concerns he has about playing LSU on Saturday.

And it centers around something we mentioned earlier this week that could be an advantage for the Tigers.

Chip Kelly’s concern about playing LSU Football

While talking with reporters, Kelly made sure to point out that UCLA doesn’t have much game film on LSU that’s helpful.

That’s because LSU has two new coordinators — Jake Peetz on offense and Daronte Jones on defense.

Here’s what Kelly had to say this week (via 247Sports):

"“There is unknown on our side because they do have new coordinators on both sides of the ball. We get what we expect to get and the evidence of what it’s going to be like. We can guess about it and look at it, but we’re going to have to make some adjustments early on both sides of the ball.”"

Offensively, Kelly can look to sophomore quarterback Max Johnson’s final two starts last year to get some ideas of what LSU might do. The offense hasn’t been completely overhauled, but it will still be different than what we saw last season under former offensive coordinator Steve Ensminger and former passing game coordinator Scott Linehan.

(This is Peetz’s first offensive coordinator job, which makes it even more difficult for UCLA to predict what LSU might do offensively.)

It will be even tougher for UCLA when it comes to LSU’s defense.

That’s because the defense has definitely been overhauled — what we saw under Bo Pelini in 2020 is not what we’ll see in 2021.

Jones hasn’t been a defensive coordinator since 2009 at Bowie State (his defensive philosophies have obviously changed since 2009), so there’s absolutely nothing for UCLA to use for game-planning purposes when it comes to the Tigers’ defense. That’s going to be a big advantage for LSU because UCLA will have to rely on making the right adjustments to their game plan.

The Tigers have another advantage over LSU because they have game film on UCLA from the Bruins’ matchup with Hawaii this past weekend. While it’s likely that UCLA used a vanilla game plan on offense and defense, it still gives Ed Orgeron and his staff a good idea of what to expect on Saturday.