Reported by Bruce Feldman, Ralph Russo and Christopher Kamrani

The LSU football operations center, its front doors guarded by a 12-foot-long bronze tiger statue, has been home to both spectacular success and infamous flameouts over the past two decades.

Still, the facility in the shadow of Tiger Stadium had never experienced a scene like the one that played out last Sunday, Brian Kelly’s final day as the head coach of the Tigers.

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It wasn’t even 24 hours after LSU had lost 49-25 at home to Texas A&M in what some staffers said was the most embarrassing game they’d been part of. The Tigers’ meltdown emptied one of college football’s most intimidating stadiums. But Sunday was back to business, even if, multiple staffers told The Athletic, nothing about the day felt really “normal.” The program was wooing some of the nation’s top recruits in the football operations center, greeting visitors with its soaring atrium, 170-seat dining hall and a massive wall of plaques commemorating LSU’s 80 first-team All-Americans.

Earlier in the day, Kelly, LSU’s fourth-year coach, had met with his boss, athletic director Scott Woodward, to talk about the direction of the program. Kelly and the Tigers had entered the season with championship expectations, but the loss to Texas A&M dropped LSU to 5-3 and out of the AP Top 25. Through 48 games at LSU, Kelly’s record was 34-14.

For a coach who signed a 10-year, $95 million contract in December 2021, that wasn’t good enough.

In the meeting, Woodward told Kelly it was time to make a change at offensive coordinator, with the Tigers ranking in the back half of the SEC in just about every relevant statistical category and, for the second consecutive season, dead last in rushing.

As staffers tried to impress recruits, the tension that had built around the program became impossible to ignore.

“You’re seeing the bigwigs walking in and out of the building,” an LSU staffer who has spent extensive time in the program told The Athletic. “‘This guy’s fired. That guy’s getting fired.’

“One of the assistants then said, ‘Man, I just saw Kelly walking out of the building with his bag and a smile on his face, and he chucked up the deuces, then got in the car and left.'”

By early evening Sunday, word leaked of a team meeting scheduled for 8 p.m. CT, and everyone around the program knew what that meant: Kelly’s time as LSU’s head coach was over.

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The LSU football program is unquestionably one of the most fruitful places to win big, and has been since the turn of the century. Louisiana is a football state where most of the blue-chippers grow up dreaming of playing on Saturday nights in Death Valley.