Maybe it’s just that my memory isn’t what it used to be, but never can I recall LSU opening a season with more … well, it’s not the question marks exactly.

Any season will have those, this one perhaps more than most.

And, despite subtle hints suggesting a spot of patience in Brian Kelly’s first year, it’s not like there’s some overriding sense of doom and gloom in Tigertown.

If nothing else, LSU fans will always find some reason for August optimism. Yeah, even back in the 1990s.

It’s more a case that — how to word this? — nobody seems to have any clue what will happen, let alone how, when the Tigers open against Florida State Sunday night in the Superdome.

At least I know I don’t.

Sorry. Total blank. The usually infallible crystal ball just stares back at me blankly.

But you can be sure of one thing: it is going to be very, very different.

Top to bottom. Across the board. Total makeover. A roster first gutted and then replenished.

Forget everything you never knew or thought you understood about LSU football.

Kelly isn’t really interested. Everything has been wiped clean.

Oh, he can’t wait to experience Tiger Stadium for the first time. Wishes he could join the tailgaters he’s heard about and he won’t be unveiling any splashy (silly) uniforms to deep-six the dress whites.

He’s not blind to tradition. He doesn’t have to put his “mark” on the program.

But he’s going to run the program his way and his way isn’t like anything LSU has seen recently.

So what makes Kelly think that his way, whatever it turns out to be, is the sure ticket? Nobody knows. Yet. But he seems quietly, unassumingly confident about it.

That right there is different.

Never mind that about the only thing that has eluded him in coaching is a national championship, something the last two LSU coaches managed to do before getting fired.

Maybe listen to the best there ever was, at LSU or anywhere else, the first of the three previous Tigers coaches to win the big enchilada.

“It’s a good job,” Nick Saban said of LSU on the SEC coaches teleconference this week — he was relaying what he said when Kelly picked his brain before taking the job.

“A lot of passionate fans there. People in Louisiana are great people. I think they’ve got a great opportunity … They’ve always had good personnel there and now they’ve got a great coach.”

To be fair, Saban was quick to add (or cover his bases): “Not that they haven’t had great coaches in the past. I’m sure he’ll do a great job there.”

But this latest LSU coach is certainly different than the previous two who won titles.

Kelly turns out to be a lot friendlier than the fan base, the media and probably the players were expecting. Pret

Pretty much a straight shooter when questioned.

But he will never be as head-shakingly quirky as Les “What’d He Just Say?” Miles or as delightfully, unapologetically Cajun as Ed “Geaux Tigahs!” Orgeron.

The entertainment will likely have to come on the field.

Maybe that’s why early on there were unfounded questions as to whether he could “fit in” with this state.

But perhaps this is the approach that LSU needs at this moment in history.

The side-show entertainment Uncle Les and Coach O brought to the party were only relevant when they were winning big.

The word on Kelly is that it’s a business-like approach, maybe a voice of reason in the midst of the crazy, zany, often drunken party that is LSU football.

Maybe … kind of like Saban. Or at least in the same mold.

He uses the term “process” almost as much as Saban, but his program catch word is “accountability.”

We don’t know what that is supposed to look like.

But Sunday you’ll start getting a clue.

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com