Everything Brian Kelly said about Jayden Daniels, LSU’s big win over Georgia State

Well, it was a great performance again, by our offense. You know, eight possessions, eight touchdowns, what more can you say? You know, it’s been exciting watching them. And I hope everybody’s enjoyed, you know, the efficiency in which they operate. I think Georgia State had a great game plan, they came in trying to hold on to the football, they had 35 minutes of possession time to our 24, hoping to, you know, shorten the game, but we’re just so efficient on offense. Daniels again, eight touchdowns, accounted for six touchdowns, two rushing. And what else was amazing was 25 for 30 for over 400 yards, I mean, 25 for 30 for 400 yards, the efficiency of that, generally, when you see 25 for 30, you see like, short passes, screens, flares, things of that nature. You know, just, you know, dominating performance from the offensive side. And I thought, you know, after the two touchdowns that we gave up defensively, two plays that we, you know, obviously felt like we should have, you know, defended better, they settled down and did a nice job for the last three quarters and were really resilient, had some nice fourth down stops, and did a nice job defensively from that perspective, so good win, these games are not easy. You know, when you come out of the SEC, after the emotions of playing SEC games, we’ve seen that, you know, and many of the games that SEC opponents, SEC teams played against out of conference opponents, you saw that with an upset or two and some close games, but our kids took care of business and you know, won 56 to 14, so really happy with them.

I think when I have, you know, the opportunity to talk about my players, I’m going to do it. And I think I mentioned that and I think in this case, I’m gonna use my opportunities to talk about my player. And I think he’s the best player in college football and every opportunity that I get I’m going to make sure that people understand that. His efficiency, his the way he takes over the game. I mean, if you’re on the other sideline, you just kind of, you know, how do you defend them? They, they tried to blitz him, that didn’t work, they dropped eight in the fourth quarter, they just said alright we’re just going to drop eight and that didn’t work. We’ve seen virtually everything this year, from trap coverages, to you know, every kind of configuration, and it just hasn’t worked. So I’m going to talk about him as much as I can.

I think right now, the way he’s playing, and the decisiveness and the way he’s taking over games, he’s the best player. And I would say that because the numbers are reaching, you know, levels that are for example, he tied Joe Burrow’s record, I don’t know many people were kind of saying what would eight touchdowns ever be, you know, touched? I mean, he tied that, you know, and I think that that’s the level of play. So yeah, I would say is the best.

Yeah, I mean, clearly, you know, we feel like we need to continue, you know, as an offense, you know, to give him an opportunity to show his skills. I mean, we’re down to one more game left in the season. And so I think it’s our job to continue to put a young man in in a positive situation to show himself to everybody and look, I mean, there is an entertainment part to this as well, and he is entertaining. And I think that that’s a good part of this where he’s he’s so entertaining people want to come see him play.

Yeah, we’re getting better up front. You know, I wish we were here a little bit earlier in the season, but we’ve made substantial progress up front and you could see that there wasn’t much room it was really thick and heavy in there. You know, they got out on a couple of quarterback runs and we misfit one play on a pressure, which I wish we could have had back but other than that we were thick and heavy up inside.

I would tell you that all facets of the game have to be executed all 11 players and we’ve seen it in different forms haven’t we? We’ve seen an offensive line that does doesn’t give up sacks, five guys working together backs doing their jobs and making great blocks or picking people up in protections, receivers blocking downfield. It’s not just you know, throwing and catching and and obviously that’s a huge part of this. And that’s what we write and talk about. But when you are that efficient, all of these other areas, they show themselves as well. And so when you have efficiency at that level, you have to do all the little things. And they’re doing all those things selflessly. And it’s it’s fun to watch. It’s fun to be part of.

Well he’s a very capable wide receiver and and his his role has been one where he’s going to get his chances because there’s so much attention paid to those other two receivers that many times he gets the one on one matchups, and he’s an outstanding receiver and he’s the beneficiary. You know, that itself I think has allowed him to not be frustrated, because he knows when he gets his chances are they’re going to be big plays. I thought Malik did a great job tonight. You know, he was a bit frustrated at times because they were tilting the coverage pretty hard to him. And he fought through it. And you know, I was proud of the way he handled himself because, you know, he still came out with a couple of touchdowns and some yardage. But, you know, those those are days in his younger days where he might, you know, we might have missed him for a couple of plays. But he did a great job today, showed great maturity.

We had a pressure on and, you know, they cracked our safety, we’re supposed to push that back and we just we didn’t fit it the right way and then Greg was in coverage on a drive route and he let it get inside him the goal line, a couple of plays that we just we made some adjustments, you know, some slight adjustments in terms of how we were going to push those back out to the safety and then you know, you know, we didn’t play the ball in the air on the where we jumped offside. You know, Stamps just need to look for the football, young player. Thought he was a little nervous early on. He settled down nicely later, made some plays. And it was just a matter of playing the ball in the air. I thought they settled down nicely. I think we played, you know, our base defense, maybe after the second quarter, we probably played it 90% of the time, we didn’t do anything else, but get our cleats in the ground and just play football.

This is building, we’re building a foundation for consistency. And look, we want to be in the playoffs. We want to we want to be in hunts for championships, and we’re not this year, but what we’re doing is building consistency. Winning is part of that consistency. And that’s why these next couple of games are very important to try to get to another 10 win season builds a consistency of winning in your program that allows you to do other things. It allows you to continue to recruit and develop and retain your players. So your program continues to move up that that ladder and that’s what we’re trying to build.