Eyes rolled from Decatur to Dothan whenever Notre Dame entered the College Football Playoff discussion under Brian Kelly.

Alabama fans witnessed the 42-14 beatdown the Tide gave the Irish in the BCS national championship game following the 2012 season, and a 30-3 blowout to Clemson in the Cotton Bowl six years later validated those doubts.

But the coach leading Notre Dame into both of those games is one of Nick Saban’s few modern peers on the NCAA’s all-time wins list, and one of the coaches he seems to revere the most.

“I’ve always had a tremendous amount of respect for Brian Kelly wherever he’s been a coach,” Saban said before Alabama played Notre Dame in the Rose Bowl following the 2020 season. “He’s had a tremendous amount of success.”

Kelly, who coached for 13 seasons for Division II’s Grand Valley State, entered this season only six wins behind Saban. Both are among the top 20 winningest coaches of all time at any level of college football.

After previously leading Central Michigan, Cincinnati and Notre Dame, this is the first season that Kelly has SEC talent at his disposal. Whatever was true about Kelly’s teams against Alabama in the past might no longer apply when LSU — ranked No. 15 in the Associated Press poll — hosts the Tide in Tiger Stadium on Saturday night.

“[They’re] probably playing as well as anybody in the country,” Saban said Monday of the Tigers, who enter 6-2 but tied atop the SEC West with Alabama. “They’re very well-coached.”

Saban’s persistent recognition of Kelly’s coaching ability has been hard to miss. During SEC media days in July, Saban called Kelly an “outstanding coach” and added he has the “utmost respect” for what he will do in Baton Rouge. The two peers spoke before Kelly took the LSU job, and Saban later said he told Kelly, “I thought he’d do an outstanding job there and it’s certainly going to be challenging for us playing against.

“They’ve always had good personnel there [at LSU] and now they’ve got a great coach.”

Saban on Monday detailed what makes Kelly’s teams well-coached.

“They’re always physical,” he said. “This will be a physical game. They always have balance on offense. They’re going to run the ball. They got a very good throwing scheme. Utilizing the personnel that they have very, very well. They’ve historically played very well on defense and special teams. It’s typical of what a well-coached team usually does.

“They’ve gotten to the point where — and all of his teams have been this way — they don’t beat themselves. You’ve got to execute and beat them, and I think that’s got to be the focus for our team.”

LSU this season ranks fifth in the SEC in turnover margin (plus-3) although it has been penalized the conference’s sixth-most yards per game (59). In Ed Orgeron’s final season as coach in 2021, LSU had a minus-3 turnover margin but was FBS’ third-least penalized team after several seasons in the middle of the pack.

The more noticeable jumps have come to LSU’s bottom line. The Tigers rank 28th in FBS in both scoring offense (35 points per game) and scoring defense (21 points) after finishing last season 80th and 71st, respectively.

”I think good coaching is good teaching and I think when you have good teaching, players do adapt and they do improve and they do adjust,” Saban said. “I think the team is playing with a lot more discipline and they’re really focused on what they have to do. I think they believe in each other. I think they believe and trust in the coaching staff they have and that’s why they made the progress that they’ve made.”

LSU enters Saturday’s game with one of the top-rated quarterbacks in the 2019 recruiting class in Arizona State transfer Jayden Daniels, and one of the nation’s top receivers from the 2020 class in Kayshon Boutte. Both players highlight the difference in what Kelly typically coached at Notre Dame.

“Maybe a little more skill on the perimeter, maybe a little bit more in those areas that were hard to get to Notre Dame — maybe a D-lineman here or there, maybe a receiver here or there, a running back here or there,” Kelly said in May about the difference in talent coming to LSU. “We’ve seen the Ja’Marr Chases, and we’ve seen the kind of players that you can get immediately here just in the state of Louisiana that are much more difficult to get year-in and year-out at Notre Dame because you’ve gotta go from coast to coast. You’ve gotta go from Los Angeles to Cleveland to find those guys.”

Kelly has walked the line between playing up his team’s capability at Notre Dame while also explaining his decision to jump to the SEC. When Alabama defeated the Irish, 31-14, in a competitive but not particularly close Rose Bowl two years ago, Kelly was defensive when he faced questions about his program’s ceiling. Even after taking the LSU job, Kelly said in July that he “thought [Notre Dame] played Alabama better than anybody in that last playoff,” which was part of the Tide’s undefeated 2020 title-winning season.

But Kelly also made it clear what motivated him to make the move to Baton Rouge.

“I want to beat Nick Saban,” he said in May. “Who doesn’t want to beat Nick Saban, you know what I mean? I want to play him in the regular season. I mean, that’s the standard, right? Now, he’s a conference opponent.”

On Saturday, with the SEC West still up for grabs, Kelly will get his latest shot.

“That’s why you come to LSU,” he said Monday. “It’s not pressure, it’s a privilege to play in games like this. It’s certainly why I came to LSU, to play in games like this.”

Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.