College football has been fascinated by Brian Kelly’s move to the bayou, but questions still remain
and his peculiar fit on the bayou as a career-long Midwestern coach with New England roots. Those within the building that we spoke with, Kelly included, have seen and heard the jokes and jabs. Some laugh. Others shrug. A few were angered.
“If Coach Kelly wins, they’re going to embrace him like Nick Saban. Nick Saban is from West Virginia and coached at Michigan State before he got [to LSU],” says Bobby Hebert, a bayou-bred Louisianian and sports talk-show host in New Orleans. “If he doesn’t win,” Herbert says in his Cajun twang, “they’ll tell him, ‘Yankee, go home!’”
It’s not that he left, Quinn says, but how and when. Kelly left for LSU six days before the release of the final College Football Playoff rankings. The Irish finished one spot out of the final four, but if they made it, Notre Dame would have played a playoff game without their head coach. “Everybody is like, ‘How can you leave your team?!’ LSU controlled the timeline,” he says. “It wasn’t the Brian Kelly timeline. The Brian Kelly timeline would have been, ‘Hey, can you wait for me? Hold the job open? Because I’d like to hang around Notre Dame until we know what’s going on [with the rankings].’’’
He and his wife, Paqui , had even recently built a home in South Bend just off Notre Dame Avenue, not far from Knute Rockne’s original house. He termed it their “forever home.” The move was made easier in that he and wife are now empty-nesters. Their daughter, Grace, is a senior at Notre Dame, while their oldest son, Patrick, is finishing his degree at Grand Valley State before he plans to join dad as an offensive graduate assistant, and youngest son, Kenzel, is a sophomore football player at Grand Valley State.
Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State and Georgia have something in common, says Al McKellar, a longtime friend of Kelly’s who worked with him at Grand Valley State and now operates an analytical recruiting service. “Guess where the kids who can’t handle academics at Notre Dame go? Where do they end up?” asks McKellar. “The Alabamas, Georgias, Clemsons. It’s about a difference-maker. At Notre Dame, my difference-maker can’t get in. It’s not that he’s a bad kid or dumb kid.
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