Brian Kelly has suffered three straight season-opener losses in his three years as LSU’s head coach, but none hit harder than Sunday night’s 27-20 loss to USC in Las Vegas.

Kelly was at odds with assistants, players and officials at various points during the primetime battle against one of the Big Ten’s newest members.

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

“It’s the first time since I’ve been here that I’ve been really upset with our football team,” Kelly said. “From a big picture perspective, we didn’t play complementary football. When we did some good things on the offensive side of the ball, we didn’t complement it defensively, and vice versa.”

Kelly pointed out the crucial penalties his team committed, including three on defense that directly led to a first down for USC.

“What concerns me the most is the personal fouls — the selfish penalties,” Kelly said. “Both of those led to scores. They’re undisciplined penalties, and those fall on me. We pride ourselves on having a disciplined program, but we clearly didn’t do a good enough job. It affected the game.”

LSU had chances to take the lead in the second half, but could never quite get a grip on 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 score 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, setting up the decisive score for the Trojans.

“Obviously, when we get up in a game, we don’t know how to conduct ourselves,” Kelly said. “You have to have a killer instinct in this game. You have to put teams away. We had a chance to put this team away, and we get complacent. We make more mistakes when we’re ahead instead of being more focused, having a killer instinct of steel. That’s disappointing.”

LSU (0-1) will try to get the ship back on course when it hosts Nicholls on Saturday at 6:30 p.m.