Not a "BK stan" but also never been ashamed to say he was a good coach who - up until the week after Thanksgiving last year when he ditched us while we were still in the playoff hunt - I was happy to see as head coach at Notre Dame for the foreseeable future. That said, he did what he did. And here we are.
As for what would have been different: His teams paid a lot more attention to detail than what we're seeing right now, and they did the extra things. Receivers blocked. Corners tackled. Tyree doesn't line up wrong on the TD throw to Mayer that got wiped out against Stanford. Etc. I'm pretty confident we're 6-1 even with the roster we have, though maybe not more likely to beat the best teams. And I think experience would tell him to take a grad transfer QB this year even if you like Buchner, because running QBs get hurt.
I feel like this is a little bit of revisionist history.
We are currently averaging less penalties per game than any season in the BK era. During BKs time the running joke was win the coin toss and receive, immediately have to burn a timeout, go 3 and out and it definitely happened frequently enough that the joke had some validity. We went 12 seasons without even trying to field special teams. Our Qbs repeatedly would scramble then just run out of bounds for a loss. Then there was the whole Joe Schmidt thing that went on for FAR too long.
The list is long but there are plenty of examples of BKs teams making the same kind of detail mistakes.
Last year we most definitely should have lost to VT and Toledo and spent most of the season trying to fit square peg in round hole, but caught a couple of breaks or would have been a 4-5 loss team.
From that team we lost our only functional QB with no replacement, a ball hawking all world safety, a complete stud RB, our best and only real threat WR and basically replaced the entire coaching staff with an entire staff of guys who had never coached together before, under a first time HC.
The players and coaches all need to show improvement, that is not up for debate, but bK would not have done siginificantly better with this same group. Recruiting also would not be where it is.
If Kelly’s teams were so well coached 2016 would have never happened, the NC State hurricane game would never happen, 2017 Miami would never happen, and the blowouts in every big time game against a good opponent would not have happened. Not saying we would have won any of them, but at least been competitive in at least 1 or two of them (defining competitive as the game not essentially being over by halftime, or in some cases the end of the 1Q)
