ATLANTA — The college football calendar runs all the way through January. For LSU, though, the most crucial game of the season will hit before September.
With all due respect to Texas-Ohio State and Alabama-Florida State, the most important matchup of 2025’s Week 1 will be LSU’s invasion of Clemson on the night of Aug. 30. The Duel of the Death Valleys will be a benchmark game for a couple of teams expected to be in the top 10-conversation all year long. For LSU, though, the potential outcomes from this game range from energizing to catastrophic, without a whole lot of options in between.
“That’s what you want, you want to play a good team,” said LSU linebacker Whit Weeks on Monday during SEC media days. “You don’t want to lollygag into the season. You want to get into a fistfight the first week.”
Brian Kelly kicked off the event with all the proper nods toward student-athletes’ growth and the enthusiasm of the LSU fan base. But looming under — or lurking behind — everything he said is the threat that Clemson poses
“We open up with a great program in Clemson,” Kelly said. “I know Dabo (Swinney) very well. Respect him and his program and the accomplishments they’ve had.”
Swinney no doubt will offer the same platitudes in Kelly’s direction when the ACC holds its media days next week. Under Kelly, LSU has won 29 games in three seasons, including 10-win seasons in 2022 and 2023.
But also under Kelly, LSU has lost all three of its high-profile openers — to Florida State in 2022 and 2023, and to USC last season. In fact, LSU hasn’t won an opener since Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase and Justin Jefferson were in uniform way back in 2019.
That year ended out pretty well for the Tigers, and Kelly understands how important it is to begin the season on the right foot.
“We needed to do some things differently this year — that is, embrace this opener,” he said. “Embracing it in a manner that this is a big game. It’s a tangible goal for our football team to want to be 1-0. That’s not, ‘Let’s warm up into the season.’ We want to be ready for this football game.”
Kelly and LSU’s roster-management experts have put the Tigers in the best possible position to succeed, hammering the transfer portal like a slot machine. LSU slots in at No. 1 in Rivals’ 2025 transfer rankings after bringing in 11 four-stars, and it now has the best roster Kelly has enjoyed in any of his four years in Baton Rouge.
Plus, Kelly has the benefit of an established, Heisman-hopeful quarterback in Garrett Nussmeier, returning for Year 2 at LSU. Year-2 quarterbacks at LSU have a strong recent record — both Burrow and Jayden Daniels won the Heisman after getting a year of seasoning — and Nussmeier has every opportunity to join them.
“Every day he comes to workouts, every day he comes to practice, he’s looking for areas to improve on,” Kelly said. “He wants to be coached hard. He wants to be coached in a manner that gets him to be the best version of himself.”
Given the fact that this is a non-conference game, either team could lose and still be in line for a conference title. But in terms of a playoff berth, the road for LSU after Aug. 30 is much more difficult than for Clemson. With a schedule that includes Florida, Ole Miss, South Carolina, Texas A&M and Alabama, there are few opportunities for the Tigers to catch their breath. Even Vanderbilt and Oklahoma pose season-wrecking challenges for LSU.
“Everybody in the whole building knows what the goals are for this season,” Weeks said. “And Clemson’s just the first team that we have to beat in order to achieve those goals.”
The two Tigers haven’t met often, only four times overall in college football history. Their most momentous meeting was their most recent, in 2020, when Burrow led LSU to a 42-25 win in the national championship. Pretty much everyone on the LSU side of the ball is gone at this point, but the glow of the program remains. And so does the allure of that first victory.
“There’s been an emphasis for us as a team, a total switch of mindset to go 1-0 and to focus on that,” Nussmeier said. “There’s no hiding from the fact we’ve lost the last five openers. That’s something we’ve acknowledged and we’ve accepted. And I think we’ve changed the way we think in order to make that connection.”
“Those are the fun games to play in, prime-time TV, 7:30 ABC,” Weeks said. “Those are the games you live for. That’s why I play football, to play in environments like that, play against teams like that.”
