Brian Kelly says LSU's veterans have 'battle scars' from previous season-opening losses

When LSU takes the field at Allegiant Stadium on Sunday night to begin the 2024 season against USC, it will be searching for its first opening game win since its national title campaign in 2019.

The Tigers have dropped back-to-back neutral site openers against Florida State to begin the Brian Kelly era, and now it faces a blue-blood in Las Vegas to begin Year 3.

Ahead of the game, Kelly told SEC Network host Paul Finebaum that the experienced veterans on this team carry “battle scars” from the previous losses. He expects that will prove to be valuable this time around.

“They know who they’re playing,” Kelly said. “They also know that we haven’t had much success in our last two openers, but having said that, we played a lot of freshmen in that opener against Florida State two years ago. And those freshmen are playing prominent roles for us.

“We have a lot of freshmen that played those first two openers. Now, they’re veterans, if you will. And we expect that those battle scars from those first two years of playing a Florida State team that was pretty good are going to pay off in this opener against USC.”

The Tigers managed to turn losses the last two openers into 10-win campaigns, but with a tough SEC schedule and a non-conference game against UCLA later in the year, they can’t afford to begin another season with an L in the record book.

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