Thursday, November 04, 2010

The consensus is in

Brian Kelly couldn't make them a championship football team in 8 games, therefore Notre Dame is DOOMED FOREVER. DOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

Also, the peanut gallery in the South Bend Tribune, a real think tank of football coaching wisdom, are now confident that Kelly will be fired. This year.

What's funny is that, when Kelly was hired, the consensus in the Tribune and in the wider world of sports punditry was that it would take him several years to build a good team in South Bend. He's implemented a very different offensive scheme, despite Michael Rosenberg's moronic assertion that Weis and Kelly have the same "philosophical approach" because they're both "passing coaches." He'd have to get his kind of recruits in there. He has to change the program's culture, shift it away from players playing for a ticket to the NFL, away from lax conditioning and defeatism.

It may be true that the sun has forever set on Notre Dame as an elite football program, that there are now insurmountable structural barriers in BCS football separating the big state schools from everyone else. If that's true, though, we'll know at the end of Kelly's term, not the beginning.

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