Notre Dame Football: Is Brian Kelly the Real Deal?

As you know, with the plethora of recent former Notre Dame coaches that have flamed out without the promised “Return to Glory,” we all hesitate to answer the question often asked at every bar that serves Guinness on tap.

The question is of course: “What do you think of Brian Kelly?”

The standard response for the typical ND fan is, “He’ll do fine given more time. “

The answer for the more knowledgeable Irish fan is, “It‘s too early to say.”

My answer is, “I need more beer to answer that.”

Brian Kelly Knows How to Coach

Don’t get me wrong, Brian Kelly knows how to coach.

His 2001 Grand Valley State team averaged 59.1 points per game. Notre Dame scored 59 points in a game once this year against Air Force. Before that you have go back three coaches ago to 1996 to find somebody we put 60 on.

Most of the current ND players were just done pooping in their diapers when Lou Holtz’s squad rolled Pitt 60-6 and followed up by gutting Rutgers 62-0.

And while you can question the competition, the GVS Lakers didn’t score 59 a game by accident. Sure, a touchdown or two were probably accidents, but not all 59 points.

To add to his growing legend, Kelly took a 4-7 Central Michigan team to 9-4 in three years. Not many coaches can boast they made a winner out of whatever a Chippewa is.

We all know that he then used his gaudy 34-6 record at Cincinnati, his rep as an offensive guru and his endless repertoire of snappy one-liners to land the ND job.

I’ll repeat, the man can coach.

But the real question is, can he coach at Notre Dame?

There’s Not Enough Tape on the Guy

Sometimes the best way to determine how a coach does at Notre Dame is to look at how he does at Notre Dame. Unfortunately, by the time you get enough games in to determine whether the coach is a bum, it turns out the coach is a bum.

Using prior coaching regimes is no help either.

So far, Kelly has logged a 16-10 record in two up and down years under the Golden Dome. As a harbinger of things to come, history tells us that the one thing we now know for sure is that Kelly went 8-5 each year.

Prognostication based on the record in the first 24 months of a football program just doesn’t work.

Even with zero previous head coaching experience, Charlie Weis was 19-6 in his first two years. A completely clueless Bob Davie was 16-9. Hell, Ty Willingham was 15-10 even though my couch worked harder than he did.

None finished with a career winning percentage at ND better than 59 percent, or just about seven wins a year.

Prior to that gamut of coaching garbage, in his first two years Dan Devine’s 17-6 start was two less wins than Charlie’s 19-6 start. Devine ended up with a national championship and a very respectable 53-16 record at ND. Plus the Irish faithful didn’t shoot his dog like they did in Green Bay.

Lou Holtz started 13-10 and finished at 100-30-2 with another national championship, all before he patented that charming lisp he uses on ESPN’s Gameday studio coverage.

Honestly, with only two years to go by, using wins and losses to judge a college coach is like going out with a new girl and having your mom call you as soon as you get to the restaurant and ask you how the date went.

Sometimes a history lesson just doesn‘t tell you much.

Look at the Numbers

Since the ghosts of coaches past have shed no light on Kelly’s true abilities, we can always turn to the numbers to see if Kelly is a step up from the prior regimes, both his and Notre Dame‘s.

In 2010, Notre Dame scored 26.3 points per game while giving up 20.2 per contest.

Offensively, that was a big drop from Kelly’s Cincy team in 2009, when the Bearcats rolled to 38.6 points every Saturday, pantsing mostly Big East competition.

Defensively, the 2010 Irish defense was slightly improved over the 23.1 per game allowed by the Bearcats in 2009.

But with different players and different opponents, different results are to be expected, even if God‘s got the headset.

So with Weis’ players at ND, was Kelly able to get more production than the Schematic King himself? Charlie Weis got 30.1 points a game from his 2009 offense, while his defense gave up 25.9 per game.

So Kelly’s 2010 26.3 PPG Irish didn’t score as much as Charlie‘s 2009 group, but his team didn’t give up as many points either. Of course, it behooves us to remember that Charlie had third-year QB Jimmy Clausen, while Kelly walked in with Dayne Crist coming off knee surgery and 10 career passes.

In reality, this kind of comparison is apples to oranges, as Charlie was in his fifth year with all of his recruits that had worked with him and his staff. Kelly on the other hand didn‘t know or recruit hardly any of the players, and was putting in entirely new offensive and defensive schemes.

It’s more like comparing apples to beach balls.

Look at the Numbers Again

Since comparing the old team to the new team is not real helpful, another possible measuring stick for any coach is the improvement from year to year. Theory has it, familiarity with the new coaches and their systems should lead to a spike in productivity, especially since the Irish returned almost the entire team from 2010.

So we ask: Was Kelly’s 2011 Irish team better than the 2011 model?

Statistically, the 8-5 2011 Irish were pretty much a mirror of the 8-5 2010 version in many respects. The scoring improved slightly from 26.3 to 29.2 with the benefit of two big blowouts against Air Force and a hapless Maryland squad.

The scoring defense was almost identical at 20.2 in 2009 and 20.7 in 2011.

Other numbers were not as pretty. Turnover margin was plus-one in 2010 and fell to a miserable minus-15 in 2011. This number was a combination of lots of fumbles, a QB that threw the rock to anybody in the secondary while refusing to discriminate based on jersey color and an Irish secondary that only came up with eight picks all year after stealing 18 passes in 2010.

Penalties increased from a solid 40.7 to an awful 59.1 yards per game.

In 2011, special teams made most Irish fans punt the remote through the LCD screen. Punting went from awful to decent to barely respectable as the year went on.

Nobody could catch a damn punt, so ND often called for a fair catch before the game started. Consequently, by the end of the regular season, Notre Dame had net punt return yardage for 12 games of exactly one yard, and that came when Theo Riddick was so surprised he caught a punt he passed out and fell forward for a yard.

The EMS group had him up and fumbling again in no time.

The kicking game was a debacle. Kickoffs were unpredictable, and coverage teams seemed to alternate games that they would show up. Field goals went from a spectacular 19-of-20 for 2010 to a pedestrian 10-of-16 with several chip shots blocked or just shanked.

In its second year, Bob Diaco’s veteran pressure defense forced two less fumbles, 10 less interceptions, one less sack and added a grand total of two extra tackles for loss.

2011’s statistics didn’t convince anyone that Kelly is the second coming of Rockne. 

Look at the Games

Aside from the numbers, for Irish Nation, the 2011 Fighting Irish were often painful to watch.

Against thoroughly inferior competition the Irish looked damn good—if only we had Boise State’s schedule every year we’d be back already, but that‘s not going to happen, ever. Be that as it may, Notre Dame looked rock solid against the Maryland’s, Purdue's and Navy’s of the world.

There were a lot of lowlights too. Notre Dame was clearly unprepared for an awful South Florida team, and was thoroughly dominated by USC and Stanford much more than the final scores indicated.

The Irish offense was anemic in the wins against MSU, Pitt and Boston College, and the epic defensive meltdown in the Michigan loss still drives most Irishmen to week-long bouts with the darker whiskies.

Press coverage in the secondary was mostly nonexistent, and the linebackers couldn’t cover a chair all year.

Athletic defenses gave the Irish offense fits, and against the better offenses Diaco struggled to make defensive adjustments.

Watching the Irish offense get strangled by FSU in the Champs Bowl as their QBs struggled while the Notre Dame defense failed to adjust was simply a microcosm of the whole year.

Kelly’s Irish played some extremely ugly football in 2011—a far cry from the disciplined veteran team the Irish faithful thought was coming.

Look at Brian Kelly

Kelly himself has not handled the bright reflection off the Golden Dome all that well as he tries to right the Irish ship.

His public profanity and childish tantrums at the USF game were a public embarrassment for the university that was heavily criticized on a national scale.

His 2010 comment after the Tulsa game of “Get used to it” was not exactly what you want to hear from a coach that is struggling and just cost his team the game against a far inferior opponent with a low percentage play asked of a freshman QB.

This year, his players were certainly not happy with him shoveling blame by noting that most of the team wasn’t “his” players.

While every college coach is going to have some media criticism, Kelly has a tendency towards “coach-speak” whenever asked a direct question that challenges his decisions.

It’s hard to say what effect Kelly’s public personna has had on the team, but it certainly colors the public’s perception of Notre Dame as a program.

The QB Circus Didn’t End

Probably more damning to the program, after attesting that he would be starting Dayne Crist for 13 games in 2011, Kelly jerked the starter in favor of Tommy Rees after one half of football.

Whether you agree with that decision or not, over the course of the year it became increasingly clear that Tommy Rees was not the answer either.

Despite increasingly poor play, high turnovers and a lack of athleticism and arm strength that handicapped the offense more and more as the year went on, Kelly stubbornly refused to give anyone other than Tommy Rees any meaningful minutes.

So for 2012, Dayne Crist is off to Kansas to help Charlie Weis try to kick-start the Jayhawks, while other than some brief action for Andrew Hendrix, no one other than Tommy Rees has seen meaningful game action for the last two years.

As a result, ND is going into the hardest schedule in the last 30 years or so with no set option at QB.

For a coach that is supposed to be an offensive guru, the failure to find and develop a true starting QB is a point of frustration that starts and ends with the coach, not Tommy Rees.

Just as alarming, Kelly has had two years with three or more college-level QBs on his roster and he still suggests that he can’t play them because they still haven’t grasped his offense.

Is Kelly's vertical spread offense that complicated that no one can get it? And if it is, what good is any college offense if it takes more than two years for a talented college quarterback to figure out how to run it?

Is Kelly planning on a good season every three years?

Noting the Progress

While the Irish have struggled in many areas during Kelly‘s young campaign, they did win eight games each year. which is nothing to sneeze at.

Kelly’s players seem much better conditioned, and instituting a training table with a proper diet is not keeping with Notre Dame tradition, but it is part of modern college football.

It is still too early to judge whether Kelly’s recruits will be more compatible with his system than prior recruiting classes, but several members of the 2010 class had to take the field in key positions and more than held their own as true freshmen.

This year’s recruiting class, while not large in numbers, has some high-quality athletes that should develop into lots of quality football players by 2013, and a few might see the field often in 2012.

Most importantly, Kelly has made a concerted effort to stock the defensive side of the ball. With the likes of Louis Nix III (originally recruited by Weis), Stephon Tuitt and Aaron Lynch, ND is finally seeing big athletic defensive lineman that can hold their own and will only get better.

Although inexperienced, Kelly has recruited the necessary numbers to build and maintain a decent secondary. The talent and depth at linebacker is also solid if not seasoned.

Although a Charlie Weis offense was often fun to watch, his defenseless squads had no chance to get to a national championship level.

If you want to know the true value of defense, the best defensive conference in the country is the SEC which won five of the last six BCS championships. This year they had two teams in the NC game. Not surprisingly, those two teams were No. 1 and 2 in the country in total defense.

While Kelly’s defense is not near the SEC standards, the fact that he recognizes the importance of that side of the ball shows he is not Charlie Weis II.

Kelly has made a concerted effort to balance his roster and recruit top talent on both sides of the ball. That balance is critical to long-term coaching success for any major program.

When it comes to recruiting and developing players to build a program, Kelly gets it.

Noting the Real Problem

While Kelly can easily overcome any media issues with a few more wins and a consistent QB, the one concern I have with Kelly is that he has a very limited staff that has cost him several games already, and the learning curve just got longer with the latest coaching carousel.

Offensive coordinator (in name only) Chuck Molnar and his stints at such powerhouses as Virginia, Western Carolina, Indiana State, Kent State, CMU, EMU, Illinois State and Cincy just doesn’t cut it.

There’s good reason he’s never been a coach in a major conference until he went to the Big East with Kelly, and it's for the same reasons he's moved on, and it‘s not because the Massachusetts job was a dream come true.

His replacement at offensive coordinator is Chuck Martin, famed coach at such dominating programs as Wittenberg, Millikin and Grand Valley State.

Where the hell is Millikin?

Defensive coordinator Bob Diaco has been schooled by more experienced offensive coordinators on several occasions (see USC, Navy, Tulsa, Air Force, Stanford, Michigan), and despite some decent games, his vast background at defensive juggernauts like Virginia, WMU, Central Michigan, Western Illinois and Eastern Michigan has not proven very effective against above average offenses.

Whether because of injury, inexperience or poor schemes, Diaco’s defenses have been under-aggressive and frequently outwitted.

To help him out, Kelly has promoted first-year linebackers coach Kerry Cook to co-defensive coordinator. Cook has six years experience coaching defensive backs at Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Kerry Cook has spent the same amount of time as a college defensive coordinator as I have.

And sorry my good friends, the suspect personnel policy doesn’t end there.

Defensive line and special teams coach Mike Elston is another Central/EMU/Cincinnati coaching product. With the horrendous special teams play by the 2011 Irish, Kelly has promoted the infamous Scott Booker to handle special teams.

You know, Scott Booker, defensive back coach at Kansas and Western Kentucky that was a TE coach and offensive assistant for the Irish for the last two years. Oh yeah, based on his resume, he has never coordinated special teams for any team at any level in his entire life.

I don’t think I need to go through the entire credentials for the current Notre Dame staff to make my point about Kelly’s choice of coaches being less than the standard for the industry, even though I pretty much did.

Ask yourself, "Self, is there is a single Notre Dame coach that could get a job in the SEC?" Probably not.

Not surprisingly, NDs only coaches with solid credentials outside the state of Iowa, the MAC and the coaching Mecca otherwise known as Grand Valley State are RB coach Tim Hinton with 17 years in college coaching and 28-year veteran OL coach Ed Warriner, both of which were plucked by Urban Meyer when he took the Ohio State job.

While Kelly’s commitment to continuity is important, talent and experience are just as critical to any football staff.

If you don’t believe me, note that after scooping up NDs most experienced position coaches, Urban Meyer kept 12-year OSU coach Luke Fickell on his staff for recruiting purposes, but immediately hired co-defensive coordinator Everett Withers with 17 years college experience and another seven coaching in the NFL.

Where do you think Michigan’s Brady Hoke would be right now without OC Al Borges’ 37 years of coaching experience in three major conferences, or the 34 years of college and NFL experience DC Gregg Mattison brings to the table?

He’d be trying to get a job as an assistant for Rich Rod at Arizona, that’s where.

Be honest, how many games would Hoke have won last year with Kelly’s staff? Six, maybe seven games?

If Urban Meyer had brought in Kelly’s current staff with him to OSU, they would probably have rescinded his offer.

That’s not to say that Kelly’s staff doesn’t have smart men that work hard, but when it comes to college coaching, there’s no substitute for experience, and Kelly’s staff is extremely lean on that end, especially when you consider the entire staff has spent 90 percent of their careers in the MAC or at Grand Valley State.

ND has paid for it already with some painful losses and will continue to pay unless Kelly corrects it or ND decides to get someone that will.

So Is Kelly the Real Deal?

This isn't a referendum on Brian Kelly's tenure as the coach of the Fighting Irish, or a call for his ouster for underperforming. The man deserves a chance to get his players in here and see what they can do, and that hasn't happened yet.

I said it and I meant it, Brian Kelly knows how to coach or he wouldn’t be at Notre Dame.

I like what Kelly has recruited, I think he has a good system to develop players, and if he ever grooves a quarterback, the influx of talent on offense and defense will help him stabilize the program so that nine wins a year is a given, with an eight blip here and there.

Ten or 11 wins whenever the schedule breaks right is not out of the question every so often.

On the flip side, I also think his staff is too provincial, and his loyalty to coaches that aren’t top shelf is going to make it difficult for him to get ND into the BCS with any consistency.

My guess is he will be Notre Dame’s Lloyd Carr until the ND Administration sees fit to replace him.

With only two years to go on, that’s about as real as it gets.