BATON ROUGE - Brian Kelly and his LSU Tiger football team are having to do extra work to scout their season opening opponent, the USC Trojans. 

USC hired new defensive coordinator D'Anton Lynn from neighboring UCLA during the offseason and the Tigers are looking at Bruin tape as well as personnel to get a feel for what to expect in the 2024 opener.

"It's hard to tell, because there's so many transfers, you know, we look at a lot of you UCLA take to get structure right in terms of understanding the structure of the defense, and then, you know, because there's so many transfers, it's really hard we break them down individually by player, and do a deep dive on each one of them as players," Kelly said of his teams preparations for their game in Las Vegas.

While at UCLA, Lynn was able to take their defense from 42nd in the country to 10th in yards allowed per game. 

Kelly also fired his defensive coordinator Matt House from a season ago, and he understands that scheme alone can't get things completely turned around.

"Obviously a lot of individually talented players, but like anything else, they got to play together as a unit. So what we've done is we've relied heavily on the unit that played together at UCLA, and expect that they're going to play in a similar fashion," Kelly added that he expects that talent to come through for the Trojans as they put the pieces together.

Trojans defensive coordinator Alex Grinch was fired on Nov. 5 as USC allowed 34.4 points per game and finished 8-5, including a 5-4 record in its final season in the Pac-12.