Brian Kelly left Notre Dame in rather controversial circumstances. Kelly led the Fighting Irish throughout the 2010s but the head coach left for LSU in November 2021, right as Notre Dame were on the edge of making the College Football Playoff. Then Kelly, who is from the Boston area, adopted a southern accent for some weird reason once he was in Louisiana.
Kelly reiterated his reasons for leaving Notre Dame for LSU and pointed at how LSU is more modern over Notre Dame, despite Kelly’s requests to modernize facilities in South Bend.
From the Associated Press:
“It’s been awesome because you’ve got incredible facilities, you’ve got players that want to be great,” Kelly told The Associated Press on the eve of his first spring practice at LSU. “I want to be in an environment where I have the resources to win a national championship. And I came down here because I want to be in the American League East.”
…
“I felt like that what I was looking for was student-athlete centered. And I was pushing for more for the student-athlete. And I wanted to see that piece. And we didn’t seem to be on the same path as to how that was going to get accomplished,” Kelly said.
Among the items Kelly was pushing? A chef dedicated to the football program and a new facility to replace the Guglielmino Athletics Complex, which currently houses the football team and does not have a dining hall.
“We don’t have that,” Kelly said of LSU’s nutrition center, reflexively referring to Notre Dame as we. “We hand out food. That’s precooked.”
Kelly’s request for a new facility was not new: “I mean, and that’s something that has been on the books since 2016.”
For obvious reasons, that didn’t sit well with those in South Bend as some took issue with Kelly’s characterization of Notre Dame’s setup and, as Bryan Driskell from SI Irish Breakdown wrote, accused Kelly of blaming the school for not winning when it was actually Kelly’s failure as a coach to get the job done.
There is certainly no love lost between Brian Kelly and Notre Dame. We’ll see what happens as the two begin a season apart from each other for the first time in over a decade.
