Notre Dame Football: Has Brian Kelly Lost the Team in Wake of Quitting Charges?

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish lost their third game this season in a 31-17 loss to their rival the USC Trojans. Now the Trojans are accusing the Irish of quitting and not really being in the game.

USC had the ball with a 31-17 point lead and the Irish let the Trojans run the ball down their throat and had no chance of getting the ball back. They looked defeated and didn't seem like they even wanted to be on that field.

Did I forget to mention that they had all three of their timeouts? Yeah, well, they didn't use any of them as the Trojans just ran the clock down and called it a day.

"At the end there, when they didn't call those timeouts, they just quit," USC linebacker Chris Galippo said after the game. "And that's what Notre Dame football's about. They're not anything like USC."

Maybe he has a point. We've seen several times where a team is down and the defense is able to get a stop and leave the offense enough time to respond. Notre Dame did neither. They didn't want to get a stop and did nothing to try and save time.

They wanted the game to end as soon as possible.

That's not how Notre Dame plays football and that's especially not how you play against a rival like USC. What makes things even worse is the fact Notre Dame was coming off a bye and knows this USC team pretty well.

"Our guys know what happened. They got their butts beat," Head coach Brian Kelly said. "They didn't play very well, and that comes with it. You get what you deserve."

I guess that's how coaches coach now? You don't play well, you don't deserve to win even if you still have a shot at a victory. You turn the ball over one to many times, the coach won't call any timeouts because you don't deserve to win.

That makes sense.

Brian Kelly was already in hot water for the horrible start to the season and this doesn't seem to be helping. It also doesn't help every time he opens his mouth with comments like that.

Did Brian Kelly and the Irish quit? Who knows.

I do know that seven minutes is a long time and if you really wanted to win the game then you would have done a lot more to try and put yourself in position to do so.

This question will be answered later in the season, but if things weren't looking good for Notre Dame then, they definitely aren't looking good now.