BATON ROUGE — LSU football coach Brian Kelly clarified comments senior linebacker Greg Penn made Saturday night following the team's 38-23 loss at Texas A&M.

The Tigers (6-2, 3-1 SEC) were outscored 31-6 in the second half once backup quarterback freshman Marcel Reed, who had started three games this season, entered the game and led the Aggies (7-1, 5-0) on five straight scoring drives.

"I don't know that Greg was referring to that fact that we weren't prepared," Kelly told reporters following the teams' practice Tuesday afternoon during LSU's second off week this season. "You don't run a defense expecting the No. 2 quarterback to come in.

"We prepared for (A&M starting quarterback) Conner (Weigman) to play, so a lot of reps for focused on the offense that Conner is part of. Throughout camp, throughout spring ball, throughout the course of the season, we have a defense and a defensive structure that stops quarterback run, that stops read option. You have to. The face of the matter is we just didn't execute it as well."

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Penn told reporters after the loss Saturday night that the LSU defense did not spent time leading up to the matchup at Texas A&M preparing to play against the zone-read offense.

"We didn't really prepare for it, honestly," Penn said. "We didn't think that he was going to come into the game. Him coming into the game kind of caught us off guard I'd say. We didn't really know what runs they were going to run, things like that.

"Them doing that opened up the game for them in terms of what they were doing on offense."

Reed took over at quarterback for Weigman at the 8:17 third-quarter mark and scored an 8-yard touchdown run on his first play. He proceeded to pile up 132 yards of offense, throwing and completing just two passes for 70 yards while running for three TDs.

"We've prepared for that kind of offense," Kelly said. "Everybody runs that what they run. They ran zone read and they ran 'bash.' We saw that last week, we've seen it every week.

"Those are things we just didn't execute as well."

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Cory Diaz covers the LSU Tigers for The Daily Advertiser as part of the USA TODAY Network. Follow his Tigers coverage on Twitter: @ByCoryDiaz. Got questions regarding LSU athletics? Send them to Cory Diaz at bdiaz@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Lafayette Daily Advertiser: Brian Kelly: LSU has 'prepared' for style of QB it saw at Texas A&M