Brian Kelly says he’s changed a lot since he became Notre Dame’s head coach. It’s a daunting thing to coach here. You go to the stadium and there are statues of Frank Leahy and Knute Rockne. You turn on the television, and there’s “Rudy” playing for the millionth time. There’s the Gipper. There’s Joe Montana. There’s Touchdown Jesus. The air is thick in South Bend with Notre Dame football. “Sure, the tradition is everywhere,” Dan Fox says. “I think about it every single day.”
Kelly admits that it’s tough NOT to think about it every day. Look at his life. He grew up a Catholic kid in Boston, he played at Assumpion and after this long and fascinating road, he was coaching Notre Dame. It was overwhelming. The job was overwhelming. The requests. The demands. The expectations. And there are the pressures, all of them, the academic pressures, the fan pressures, the media pressures, the historic pressures.
All those pressures have crushed good coaches. Kelly says they will not crush him. He’s learned to delegate. He’s better at spending time with his family now. He’s better at letting things go, at ignoring the distractions, at avoiding the media advice that is always available. There have been some tough times already for him at Notre Dame -- a handful of scandals, rough losses, recruiting challenges, the famous Notre Dame demand to excel academically AND win -- and he says that dealing with all of them have helped him get stronger as a coach.
Kelly is an interesting case study. He doesn’t have one particular way he coaches. Kelly has coached teams that won largely because of great offense and, especially last year, teams that won largely because of great defense. He does not coach by intimidation but, at the same time, he’s not the classic joke-around, I’m-your-buddy players coach. He’s won everywhere, and yet he’s not really talked about as a tactical genius. His coaches talk about the trust he shows in them. His players talk about how he has a knack, when their legs are just about to give way, of shouting: “OK, let’s cut practice short today and get some rest.”
And most of all, everyone talks about his knack for getting inside them. Kelly knows that this will be the toughest season. This is the season Notre Dame proves it is truly back as a national power or the season Notre Dame falls back and leaves everyone to wonder if 2012 wasn’t just one of those occasional good seasons that give false hope to fans who believe the Irish can once again be the best football program in America. It’s an open question.
And Kelly insists that the way to deal with it -- the best way to handle it -- is to forget about all of it and remember what really matters.
“When you’re head coach at Notre Dame, it’s so important on a day-to-day that you keep in perspective why you’re doing this job,” Kelly says. “And that is, you want to be around 18-to-21-year old kids that are the best and brightest in the world. And THAT’S why you’re doing this job. You’re not doing it for any other reason.”
