To give yourself a reasonable chance of being an elite football team, we all know that it takes a list of things:
A). Powerful Lines and the staff to bring out that power under precision and controlled violence;
B). A dynamic playmaker at quarterback and the coach to bring out the combination of disciplined general plus riverboat gambler in that player;
C). SPEED everywhere in proper expectation of what you want at different positions and coordinators who actually want to emphasize that speed;
D). Enough athleticism to make schemes work and a brilliant head coach capable of constructing and overseeing elite schemes, and massaging them to fit circumstances; {every player doesn't have to be an Olympian talent, but every player must be at least impressive.}
E). Player leadership and a staff and schemes which encourage some degree of individual flourishing both on the field and in the off-field athlete interactions.
Each of us can decide what we have built here under Kelly, with Harry, and with the replacement of Diaco by Van Gorder. I, in whatever foggy view I have of it, see A-->D as areas where we are exploding into something really special. I see E as a quality which seems more difficult than the others. I believe that we'll always get some leadership out of the OLine --- and that Harry's style facilitates that --- maybe Big Mike will be one, but he'll probably have to share it with Elmer as time passes. Controversially, I sense that Diaco's robotic defensive scheme was NOT conducive to facilitating leadership --- it placed all players as gears in a clock. Thankfully he INHERITED a bunch of leadership [Manti, KLM, et al] which all graduated, leaving us deficient last season . Van Gorder's less robotic approach may help with that. And, also controversially, Notre Dame's greater tendency to have actual human beings playing football [esp. "RKGs"] makes it a little tougher in my mind to get hard-assed semi-violent on-field leadership happening. This is why I smile when I hear that a guy like McGlinchey is on-the-field "mean" and that his line-mates [Elmer and NMart] are too. {hopefully they all get this.}
If Kelly can get the "spontaneous" leadership that ND needs [it can't really be "planned" no matter what gimmicks he has been using to try to raise that up --- he has these leader groups and other occasions where he builds team unity, but I doubt that they can create true leadership that way], then I believe that ND is ready. And, assuming we can keep the critical staff [most especially Hiestand, Van Gorder, Alford, and Coach himself], we're ready for a decade.
