Lincoln Riley joins coaches facing major pressure in 2026
Mike Norvell, Luke Fickell and Lincoln Riley lead the list of coaches facing pressure entering the 2026 college football season.
This year, for the first time in nearly three decades, Brian Kelly won’t be patrolling the sidelines on college football Saturdays.
That doesn’t mean he won’t be around football.
On Saturday, the former LSU and Notre Dame coach made his broadcasting debut on CBS alongside Rich Waltz and Adam Breneman for North Dakota State vs. Jacksonville State in Week 0 — the first FBS game that the Bison played after dominating the FCS level.
One of Kelly’s standout moments on the broadcast came in the second quarter just before halftime, when he offered a glimpse into his coaching career after the stadium clock at the Fargodome failed to stop during a two-minute drive.
“This would be a Monday morning meeting with the game management crew in my office, if I’m at home and the clock’s running,” Kelly said on the broadcast.
To keep the conversation going and draw more out of Kelly’s coaching side, Breneman asked the former Notre Dame coach to give an idea of what he would say during the Monday morning meeting he had referenced earlier.
“Just, ‘You guys need to do a better job,’ and I’d leave it at that,” Kelly responded, earning a subtle, soft chuckle from his broadcast booth mates.
Kelly will serve as an analyst for select college football games this season for CBS, in addition to appearing on CBS Sports Network’s “Inside College Football” on Tuesdays.
Kelly was fired by LSU last October after going 34-14 in his four seasons at Baton Rouge, including 5-3 in 2025 at the time of his firing. It marked the first time in his coaching career that he’d been fired, and it came with an approximate $54 million buyout, the second-most-expensive in college football history, behind Jimbo Fisher’s $76.8 million at Texas A&M in 2023.
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