LSU head coach Brian Kelly acted pretty upset at his post-game press conference after his team lost to newly-minted Big Ten power USC. But Paul Finebaum was pretty confident that Kelly’s passion in the media room was merely that – acting.
Appearing on ESPN’s Get Up on Tuesday, Finebaum admonished Kelly for performatively punching the table during his press conference. He feels that it was a “bad attempt at acting” by the third-year LSU coach.
“I think what hurt more than anything was just the performative punch of the table that everyone in America is laughing at in the aftermath. Because nobody really believes it was authentic,” Finebaum said, via On3 Sports. “It was a bad attempt at acting.”
This wasn’t the first time that Finebaum was critical of Kelly’s press conference. He had a similar message on SportsCenter, calling Kelly “0-1 at trying to act” as well as on the field.
“Brian Kelly is 0-1 on the field and he’s 0-1 at trying to act. That was not an Oscar-winning performance. First of all, you’ve got to punch with your verbalizing comments. He had it all wrong,” Finebaum said. “I mean, I’m a big fan of Brian Kelly and I think his record is spectacular. But that was just too little, too late. You do that before the game, you do that at halftime, you do that on the sidelines. You don’t do it afterwards. He did take the focus away from his players and maybe that was his goal. But, in the end, it’s still a loss and a terrible loss at that.”
The LSU Tigers find themselves 0-1 to start the season but don’t have many tough games for the next few weeks. They play four of their next five games at home and even get arch-rival Alabama at home in early November.
There’s a pretty good chance that we won’t see Kelly performatively angry in a post-game press conference for a while.
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