After Saturday’s reports that Tom Herman and Ed Orgeron would be taking over at Texas and LSU, respectively, some folks might have thought this year’s coaching carousel would be a bit less exciting than years past. If you want some coaching craziness, though, you can’t do much better than Brian Kelly leaving Notre Dame.
And according to this report from Yahoo’s Pat Forde, that’s exactly what we might be getting:
Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly has reached out through representatives to explore coaching options outside Notre Dame, sources told Yahoo Sports.
Kelly just completed his seventh season as coach of the Fighting Irish, a 4-8 debacle that was the school’s second-worst record of the last 52 years. The disappointment was compounded by news Tuesday that the NCAA is vacating 21 Notre Dame victories in the 2012-13 and 2013-14 seasons for academic misconduct involving eight players.
However, sources told Yahoo Sports that Kelly’s curiosity regarding other jobs was not spurred by the NCAA sanctions and predates that development. Although Kelly has come under fire from some Notre Dame fans this year, athletic director Jack Swarbrick has consistently stated that Kelly’s job is safe.
Notre Dame sources said Saturday night that Kelly has expressed no desire to leave the school.
Whoa, yeah, that’s the good stuff. Kelly could be playing a few different games here. He could be angling for a reworked contract, bluffing a desire to leave, in order to protect himself from a year on the hot seat next season. He could also just be preemptively starting the conversation to force Notre Dame to release a statement supporting him.
Or, most tantalizingly, he really does want out. It’s a difficult job, mostly because as Kelly himself has shown, it’s tough to achieve sustained success at Notre Dame. It’s a name brand school in terms of expectations, but it’s not the name brand for recruiting it once was. And I’ve spent a lot of time in South Bend. It’s a lovely campus, with an excellent Five Guys nearby, but South Bend isn’t the easiest sell for national recruits. And without top talent, it’s difficult to compete on the level most people associate with “Notre Dame,” even though they haven’t really been that program for decades.
Now, he might be preemptively angling to leave because he senses the writing on the wall, too. He’s presided over an academic scandal at Notre Dame. That’s not where you want to make that mistake. There have also been much, much more important failures on Kelly’s watch, for which he deserves varying degrees of responsibility. (Look up Declan Sullivan and Lizzie Seeberg, if you’ve forgotten already.) Combined with regression on the field, there’s a pretty solid case to be made that he should lose his job.
But that’s not really how college football works. If Kelly had gone undefeated the past few seasons, the school wouldn’t care about anything that happened off the field.
In any case, where might Kelly go if he does decide to leave? He’s been linked to NFL jobs in the past, though it’s a bit early in the calendar to be reaching out to leave for the professional ranks. There are a few college jobs open, of course, and more could open in the near future.
For example:
NEWS w/ @DanWolken: Oregon officials coming to terms with necessity of firing Helfrich, ready to start search: https://t.co/oWAr9szflC
— George Schroeder (@GeorgeSchroeder) November 27, 2016
Not saying Oregon is a fit, of course. Just that there are going to be openings. If Kelly wants out on his own terms, we could very well see it happen.
Whether that’s likely, though, is another story entirely.
[Yahoo]
