[autotag]Brian Kelly[/autotag] knew he would have to answer a question after the game about his feelings on losing [autotag]Andre Sam[/autotag] to a targeting penalty.
After the previous week’s loss to Alabama, the talk around the country was the hit Dallas Turner made on [autotag]Jayden Daniels[/autotag] that knocked Daniels out of the game but was not called targeting.
Fast forward seven days and the Tigers lost a starting defensive back to targeting after being whistled for a hit to Florida’s running back. As you can imagine, that call made LSU fans across the globe livid as they wondered where that flag was last week.
Here is what Kelly had to say about the call.
“I figured that was going to come up, I needed to take a little bit more time to make sure that I was articulating this the right way, I just think that we’re in a bad position in college football as it relates to targeting,” Kelly said. “And I brought this up when we had the transmitter in the helmet, I had been pounding that table for the transmitter in the helmet for about three years, and it’s fallen on deaf ears until all of a sudden, there seems to be this sign-stealing epidemic. And now everybody wants to put the radio piece in the helmets. Well, we’re gonna get to that with targeting as well, when you have a situation like we did, where Jayden Daniels gets hit underneath the chin, driven to the ground and is concussed and it doesn’t get reviewed.
“And then we have a play like tonight, which was a normal football play where a running back is lowering his shoulder, and we are trying to make a tackle. We’re not targeting. We’re not trying to lead with the helmet. We’re just trying to make a tackle. We throw a kid out of the game. That is tragic. We’re in a bad place right now. And we need to stop and figure this out. Because there’s a lot of words I could use. But it’s tragic that we threw a kid out of the game, because he was trying to play football and you whatever, semantics, there’s going to be a great explanation about this. Oh, he used the crown of his helmet. Or he did this, he did that, he was playing football. Last week, that guy that hit Jayden Daniels was trying to knock him out. You can say whatever you want. But that’s what he’s trying to do. Our guy was trying to make a tackle. So everybody’s smart enough to figure that out. But we have two different outcomes. We got to figure it out.”
The NCAA is going to have to figure out what is targeting and what is not.
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