Teasing Brian Kelly has become a popular sport, but CFP rankings show LSU has hired a giant coach

If Brian Kelly made a dollar for every malicious tweet about him in the week after he became the new head coach of the LSU Tigers, he would be sitting on a pile of about $95 million high.

Oh, man, so what?

He does.

It was Kick Kelly week in the US after he left Notre Dame and its 11-1 season for a new position in Baton Rouge. However, when that week was over, Kelly was still carrying that bag and the revealing suit appeared in the rankings published by the College Football Playoff Committee.

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Team #4 is the Cincinnati Bearcats, the program he essentially invented nearly two decades ago, taking over a nicely built roster from previous coach Mark Dantonio and invigorating a community. simultaneously indifferent to college football in general and especially the brand playing at UC. Kelly built the stage that made current coach Luke Fickell a star.

Team Number 5 is Notre Dame, the show where Kelly energizes with his gift for attacking football and his perseverance. The Irishman had spent three coaches failing to win even 60% of their games in the decades before he arrived – four if you count George O’Leary, who resigned before coaching. a match because of the difference in his background. The Irish were only 91-67 in the 13 years before Kelly. They are 106-39 with him, including two CFP appearances, one in a BCS title fight, and a 54-9 record over the past five seasons.

Exactly 20% of this season’s most successful teams owe much to Kelly for their success. If there is any doubt, have your proof that LSU has hired a football coach himself to take Ed Orgeron’s place. Kelly is easily the best person to join campus since Nick Saban left campus in 2004 to try his hand at the NFL.

And the Tigers have won two national titles since then.

It will be very frustrating if Kelly doesn’t figure out how to make those triple numbers over the next half-dozen years.

It’s amazing how many people were in awe to learn that Kelly would be leaving Notre Dame at this point. When I visited him in September before he rose to the top of the Fighting Ireland list for his coaching career victories – he was set to break the record Knute Rockne held for 90 years – it cost him nothing that ND has been a scary place for even the most successful coach.

Ara Parseghian lasted only 11 working seasons, even though he won two national championships and 84% of his games. Lou Holtz won one championship and could have won another but passed away after 11 years. Dan Devine won the national championship in 1977 but had enough after six years.

Kelly told me he was unaware of that history when he left Cincinnati in 2009 to become head coach of Ireland.

“I really didn’t know about it until I was doing it for a few years and then I thought: Wow, what a coincidence!” Kelly said then. “I was thinking about work more and, OK, it made sense to me.”

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Kelly’s tenure of 12 seasons was the longest of any Irish coach since Rockne. Maybe it was Kelly’s mistake to drop out of a college other than a television gig, like Parseghian and Holtz.

Because the ridiculous mechanics of college football recruiting focus so much on December – it’s not a new first signing period, because coaches did this long before Kelly abandoned the Bearcats before the Sugar Bowl in 2009 – colleges asked their new hires to jump right into that important aspect of program building. Kelly leaving with the ND is still technically available to be selected for the CFP, although it will have a lasting mix of outcomes.

It would have been better if Kelly and LSU could withhold their notice until the CFP field was established and Notre Dame was absent, but stupid hiring rules allow – no, encourage – programs that don’t Compete in conference title games to proactively visit potential clients over the weekend. Delay means disadvantage.

There is no graceful way for a college coach to accept a new position, especially in football. No one in men’s basketball since Bill Frieder in 1989 has dared to take a new job before the NCAA Tournament is over for his team, but time is less productive because of the hiring-while-demanding schedule. more about the coach – makes better sense for the structure of the sport. In football, you go out and start working on your new program or you’ll fall behind.

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There were aspects of Kelly’s time at Notre Dame that drew criticism, perhaps even detractors. The incident in 2011, when student worker Declan Sullivan was killed when the cell tower where he stood while filming the team’s internship was knocked down by a strong gust of wind, was a horror. Kelly was never formally assigned responsibility – Notre Dame was fined by Indiana’s OSHA – but that circumstance will always be revisited in discussions about his career.

However, the history regarding his LSU exit ritual has been over-produced as a Marvel movie. It’s time for him to move on. Unlike his most successful predecessors in the post-Rockne era, Kelly was not forced to avoid football coaching as a way to recover from the demands of the Irish executive. He can do what he does best – what he does better than most – and get rewarded for those efforts.

Kelly will only be a part of this year’s College Soccer Rounds in spirit, but he’ll be there in the flesh before you know it.