Brian Kelly's Biggest Challenge at Notre Dame: Big Red Circles

Brian Kelly knows how to win.  He says this about himself, and based on his track record at Grand Valley State, Central Michigan, and Cincinnati, I’m not about to call him a liar.

However, in his first press conference as Notre Dame’s new head coach, he also says about himself that he lives in the present, and none of those other schools are his present.

Kelly’s present is teaching the Irish football team how to win, something they have not done consistently in 16 years.

With the present comes a new challenge that is bigger than any other for Notre Dame football, which is not exactly a short list.  The academic standards, neurotic fan base, and South Bend “allure” are unmistakable challenges, but they have a relatively low impact on Kelly’s ability to win games for the Irish.

The particular challenge I’m thinking of is one that Kelly cannot see on a day-to-day basis and one which he has limited control over.  It is specific only to a few teams in every sport, and Notre Dame happens to be one of those few teams in college football.

The challenge is that every game Kelly coaches at Notre Dame will have a big red circle on every opposing team’s calendar.  In these Rings of Hell, every team on the opposite sideline, from the head coach to the water boy, is going to give the Irish their best shot. 

With few exceptions, every Irish opponent will be more physically, mentally, and emotionally charged up for their game against Notre Dame than for any other game on their schedule.

It’s an interesting phenomenon that the cliche of “preparing for this game just like any other” seems to be a myth, that all match-ups are apparently not created equal.

Logically, teams should approach all games with uniform mentality and preparation, to try to win them all with equal effort.  But things like emotion, pride, allegiance, and prestige change the formula.

Some of these “big ticket games” are known well before the season starts. Frequently taking the form of rivalries generally due to either geographic proximity or what is often understood as “a history.”  These games can also appear or disappear mid-season depending on performance.  

The 2009 Cincinnati-Pittsburgh game took a leap in significance from the beginning of the season with a Big East Championship on the line.

The Irish primarily fall in the former category, even when they have a bad year.  The difference for Kelly is that a football team like Cincinnati played few games where they were the target, the opposite will be true at Notre Dame.  

An underdog is never a target, and even after a successful 2008 season under Kelly, Cincinnati still felt like an underdog in 2009.  

The only time Notre Dame will ever be an underdog is in the bookies’ line.  They sneak up on no one, and any in-season success by the Irish raises the stakes even higher.

I would argue that Notre Dame football’s status as a conference independent further amplifies this challenge (and don’t confuse this statement as an endorsement for ND football conference affiliation.) 

Take Irish nemesis USC as an example of another team with national prominence but with a conference affiliation.  

USC’s opponents in the PAC-10 all share a similar goal of winning the conference title. That means a USC conference opponent, like Oregon, would certainly treat a game against USC with importance, but that importance would also be shared across eight other games.

In short, it would be possible for Oregon (or any other PAC-10 team) to lose to USC and still achieve its goal.  Thus USC does not bear a widely disproportionate brunt of the focus from the majority of its scheduled opponents.

On the surface then, it is a bit counter-intuitive to say an Oregon-Notre Dame game would be substantially more important to Oregon as such a game would not impact Oregon’s conference championship goal.  

But the prominence (at least historically speaking) of Notre Dame and the national stage for all Irish contests carries a magnitude all its own, one that has coaches planning for such a game weeks and months before the first fall practice.  In the minds of Irish opponents, a game against Notre Dame almost creates an instant arch-rivalry, even in the absence of any prior history.

So what will it take for Kelly to successfully dodge those big red targets?

Success starts with keeping the opponent’s inferno down to a smolder.  Lou Holtz, famous for his public and often comical inflation of every opponent’s ability, perhaps understood this better than anyone.  

On the other side of the coin, Charlie Weis might as well have tossed a match into the Gulf oil spill when in his introductory press conference as Irish head coach he infamously declared his “decided schematic advantage.”

But the real key is to accept Notre Dame’s role as Goliath and transform a defensive, reactionary attitude of “how do we match our opponents’ intensity” to an offensive mindset.  Kelly spoke to this concept in his press conference at the open of fall camp, saying, “The idea of the Fighting Irish..., the idea of playing anywhere against anyone at any time has been a constant conversation.”

With all of his past achievements, Kelly understands that for his team to win they must believe that their best is better, that their will to win will always be greater than that of their opponent.  

The test is whether he knows (or will learn quickly) just how much stronger his teams must be to out-will every challenger’s best.

If he doesn't, those big red circles transform from targets into a noose.