No fake accents but staunch belief in the Southeastern Conference.
That was Brian Kelly Wednesday at the SEC's annual spring meetings along the Florida Panhandle.
Kelly both proclaimed this LSU squad -- his fourth on the Bayou -- would by far be his best team while he also threw down a challenge for the Big Ten Conference.
"We want to compete against the Big Ten," Kelly, who infamously mimicked a Southern drawl in his first public appearance as LSU's coach three-plus years ago, told a gaggle of reporters inside the Hilton Sandestin. "Look, the Big Ten right now holds it on the SEC. They've won the last two national championships. That's the reality of it.
"We want to get challenged in that regard, and we'd like to be able to get that done."
While Kelly said the onus of such a Big Ten-SEC scheduling alliance falls upon respective athletics directors and commissioners, he doubled down on his belief in the SEC as the top to bottom best conference in college football.
"We have the depth in this league, from top to bottom, and we are the premier league in the country," said Kelly, who three times at Notre Dame guided the Irish to compete for a national championship in 2012, 2018 and 2020. "You can do it in the Playoffs, too; absolutely, no doubt.
"But you can also show yourself during the regular season in this opportunity."
Kelly is perhaps eager to show this LSU team because of the Tigers' roster, with quarterback Garrett Nussmeir headlining the lineup.
"I'm bullish on this team as well," Kelly told ESPN's Paul Finebaum. "Look, every coach who's here believes they've got the best team they've ever had. You leave these meetings and you think is there's a chance I can win a game. We know our roster; this is the best roster we've put together.
"It's part of a process that has taken a little bit more time than we've wanted but we're doing it the right way and we're pretty excited about what our football team looks like."
Kelly's LSU squad has a clear path to a potential bid in the again-modified 12-team College Football Playoff, which is moving this season to a straight seeding format and ending the automatic byes for conference champions after just one year. LSU opens its season at Clemson in addition to an SEC slate that includes contests against Florida, Ole Miss, Texas A&M, Alabama and Oklahoma, among others.
"To me, you know when I was at Notre Dame, we played for the national championship and it was the old system; it was done by a computer," Kelly said. "Today, it's very subjective. What we'd like to see is maybe a combination of some of the analytics, some of the strength of schedule components. I know a lot of people use RPI; we probably couldn't use RPI because we just don't have enough body of work in terms of games but if we could blend those two together the selection process is a lot cleaner relative to who should be in and who shouldn't be in. I think we started with straight seeding. That was the first iteration of where we needed to be. I think we can streamline it with more data and I think the more data that we have so that you're not just looking at the right-hand column, it has to be about more data than that.
"You have to be able to look at other factors, and I think that's what I'm getting to with you. If we can add a little bit of the metrics, if you will, with subjective decisions, I think we'll find a better place."