BATON ROUGE - Brian Kelly and his LSU Tiger football team finished their first season together ranked in the top 20 of the Associated Press top 25 football poll, landing at the No. 16 position.

Final Rankings Of 2022 pic.twitter.com/WMxM4RPsPX

— LSU Football (@LSUfootball) January 10, 2023

LSU was No. 16 after being unranked in the preseason.

Coach Kelly's season had plenty of ups and downs. They were ranked as high as No. 5 in the CFB Playoffs and, despite easily beating Purdue in the Citrus Bowl, LSU was unable to leapfrog any of the teams ahead of them.

National champion Georgia tops the final AP Top 25 of the season, TCU, Michigan, Ohio State and Alabama round out the top five.

See the full poll presented by @RegionsBank: https://t.co/7dTTUiSC1j pic.twitter.com/wDcr2fARXP

— AP Top 25 (@AP_Top25) January 10, 2023

More on the poll can be found here from the Associated Press:

Georgia remained the No. 1 team and became the 12th back-to-back national champion in the history of the rankings after routing TCU on Monday night.

The last team to finish consecutive seasons No. 1 in the AP Top 25 was Alabama in 2011 and ’12.

The Horned Frogs were No. 2, their best final rankings since the 2010 season. Michigan was No. 3, followed by Ohio State and Alabama.

Tennessee was No. 6, giving the Southeastern Conference half of the top six teams.

Tulane was ninth, its first appearance in the final poll since the Green Wave finished seventh in 1998.

No. 11 Florida State is back in the final Top 25 for the first time since 2016, LSU will open the 2023 season in Orlando against the Seminoles.

Mike Leach’s final team at Mississippi State finished the season at No. 20. Leach died suddenly of a heart condition last month before the the Bulldogs won their bowl game against Illinois to finish 9-4.