Brian Kelly is still trying to clean up the mess around his Notre Dame departure, and the latest version of the story doesn’t seem likely to change many minds.
In a wide-ranging conversation on The Independent Podcast with Pete Sampson and Matt Fortuna, the former Notre Dame coach revisited the move that sent him from South Bend to Baton Rouge. Kelly insisted his comments had been taken the wrong way when people connected his exit to whether the Fighting Irish could win it all.
“I think I was mischaracterized only in the sense that I didn't leave Notre Dame because they couldn't win a national championship. Those words never came out of my mouth,” Kelly said when asked if he would do anything differently about the way he did leave the Fighting Irish. “What I said is if I'm going to leave, I'm going to go to a place that can win a national championship.”
“And that was perceived as being, oh, he doesn't think he can win one here.”
Kelly’s point is that he never directly said Notre Dame couldn’t get there. But the reaction to the line was never hard to understand, either. When a coach says he wants to go somewhere that can win a national title, it doesn’t take much for people to hear the part that isn’t being said out loud.
That interpretation has followed him for years, and Kelly has had plenty of time to push back on it. He simply never did much to change how that comment landed.
He also made clear that, in his view, the fallout from a coaching move like that is just part of the business, even if he said the timing is rough on everyone involved.
“So look, I think we all know this, and now dipping my toes into the media a little bit, there's never a great time. The timing stinks, and it stinks mostly for the players. But it's not easy on the coaches either,” Kelly said (cue the world’s tiniest violin).
“It's a difficult process where one school is trying to get themselves up and off the mat, and the other school is like, wait a second, where are you going? So it's never an easy situation. I don't think I'm the first one that's been caught in that situation.”
Kelly is right that coaching changes happen all the time. What makes his case different is how much resentment still hangs around the Notre Dame exit. That isn’t just a routine case of fans being upset a coach left.
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