Brian Kelly has suffered three consecutive season-opening losses in his three years as LSU head coach, but no loss has hit the coach harder than the 27-20 loss to USC on Sunday night in Las Vegas.

Kelly experienced several frustrated moments with assistants, players and officials during the prime-time battle against one of the Big Ten’s newest members.

After the game, Kelly expressed how dissatisfied he was with his Tigers.

“It’s the first time since I’ve been here that I’ve been pretty angry at our football team,” Kelly said. “Overall, we haven’t played complementary football. When we’ve done good things on offense, we haven’t complemented that on defense and vice versa.”

Kelly pointed to key penalties his team committed, including three on defense that led directly to first downs for USC.

“What concerns me most are the personal fouls – the penalties that were selfish,” Kelly said. “Both of them resulted in points. They are undisciplined penalties and they reflect on me. We pride ourselves on having a disciplined program, but clearly we didn’t do a good enough job there. That affected the game.”

LSU had opportunities to take the lead in the second half but was never able to fully control the game. The Tigers had a nine-play, 61-yard drive that ended with a 31-yard field goal by Damian Ramos to tie the game at 20-20 with 1:47 left.

USC quarterback Miller Moss responded with an impressive 2-minute drill that ended with a 13-yard touchdown run by Woody Marks, scoring the winning point for the Trojans.

“It’s clear we don’t know how to behave when we get ahead,” Kelly said. “In this game, you have to have a killer instinct. You have to shut down the opposition. We had a chance to shut down this team and then we got complacent. We make more mistakes when we’re ahead instead of focusing better and having a killer instinct. It’s disappointing.”

LSU (0-1) will look to turn things around when it hosts Nicholls on Saturday at 6:30 p.m.