Blue & Gold Illustrated: 2012 Notre Dame Football Preview
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4 ✦ BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED 2015 FOOTBALL PREVIEW BY LOU SOMOGYI P erceptions can be difficult to overcome. Newly endowed Corbett Family Notre Dame head football coach Brian Kelly learned it the hard way in January 2013. Hours after his then-No. 1 Fighting Irish were routed 42-14 by the Alabama Crimson Tide in the BCS National Championship Game, Kelly had an audience with the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles, which had a head coach- ing vacancy. The position was filled by a Kelly — Or- egon's Chip Kelly — but the ramifications of that meeting still linger for the current Notre Dame head coach. That interview more than two and a half years ago is now considered an early exit strat- egy for someone who joins Ohio State's Urban Meyer as the only current coach in college football to reach a 12-0 mark at one point dur- ing a season at two different schools (Kelly did at Cincinnati and Notre Dame, while Meyer achieved it at Utah and Ohio State, the latter when probation prohibited the Buckeyes from going to a bowl in 2012). Even last November, while Meyer was on his way toward a third national title and Kelly was in the throes of a four-game losing streak, the latter's name was bandied around for vari- ous coaching jobs in the NFL, and even at the University of Florida. ESPN's well-respected Chris Mortensen (who shares the same business agent as Kelly) reported on the SVP & Russilo radio show that the Irish head coach was "a pretty serious candidate for the Florida job," among others. "There are NFL teams that are looking at Brian Kelly, that see him as a CEO type …" Mortensen continued. "Notre Dame, as great as the tradition and the institution is, still has some restrictions. There are still academic standards that are above and beyond the norm." When asked about the rumors, Kelly replied half jokingly during the slump: "I'm hoping to hold on to this job. That would be good for me." But it's not like he said no. For The Record This June, though, when asked by Blue & Gold Illustrated about his name being regu- larly mentioned with the NFL, Kelly was more direct. "I don't know why," he replied in a miffed tone. "I interviewed one time for an NFL job. Now, I'm always linked to the NFL, and that's crazy. I don't know how to stop that other than to say there's no other place, first of all, in col- lege that I would want to coach. "No. 2, I get to pick the players that play for me. I get to negotiate the contracts, I've got the salary cap, I've got all that. In the NFL, you don't get to do any of that. Look what Chip Kelly's going through. He tries to control all that and he gets killed for it. I can do all that here at Notre Dame. "Why would you want to go into a NFL situation, where you've got somebody con- trolling your players, somebody controls the contracts, somebody controls the salary cap? You have no control." Kelly said the exploratory interview with the Eagles was the first time he learned about the realities of how an NFL head coach is much more at the mercy of front office deci- sions than he ever would be in college. "That's why I said, 'Uh uh,'" Kelly said. "I've been in this long enough. If I can't have control over those things — and I won't get control over that. [New England head coach] Bill Belichick gets control over that, but he's won [four] Super Bowls. I needed to know that to make sure that I wanted to do what I was doing. "After seeing that and after talking to a number of the guys that I now know in the NFL, it's crazy. You can control all those things at Notre Dame." Academic Issues Ironically, it was Kelly's lack of control, or being in the dark, regarding the highly publi- cized academic probe and suspension of five Notre Dame players for academic reasons in 2014 that has many believing he is primed to exit Notre Dame after a second top-10 caliber season. This June, he commented to The South Bend Tribune about the school's academic demands. "I think we recognized that all of my foot- ball players are at risk — all of them — re- ally," Kelly said. "Honestly, I don't know that any of our players would get into the school by themselves right now with the academic standards the way they are. Maybe one or two of our players that are on scholarship." Kelly added that he and the school are UNDER THE DOME A CONTROLLED SITUATION Brian Kelly says his plan is to be in it for the long haul at Notre Dame Kelly, one of only two active college football coaches to reach a 12-0 record at two different schools, stated unequivocally that he does not have any interest in coaching in the NFL. PHOTO BY BILL PANZICA