What Brian Kelly’s Contract Extension Means For Notre Dame

Brian Kelly is going to be living in South Bend a bit while longer.

Just weeks after paying the last amount of money owed to former Notre Dame football coach Charlie Weis, the University of Notre Dame announced that Brian Kelly has signed a 6 year contract extension, since after all… they have a few bucks to spare.

This would put the length of Brian Kelly’s tenure at Notre Dame at 12 years. Kelly has a 55-23 mark with Notre Dame in 6 years and 3 bowl wins along with an appearance in the BCS Championship Game in 2012 following a 12-0 regular season.

Brian Kelly released a statement:

"“I want to thank Father Jenkins (University president Rev. John I.Jenkins, C.S.C) and the leadership of Notre Dame for their confidence in me. I coach football because I believe there are few better avenues for impacting the lives of young men, and I am certain that there is no better place to that than the University of Notre Dame. During the next six years I look forward to continuing to lead a championship caliber program, but more importantly I look forward to continuing to help the student-athletes I coach to achieve greatness as football players, as students and as men who will make a difference in families, communities, and organizations they will someday lead.”"

What this means for Notre Dame and its fans, is that the stability that Brian Kelly brought to the program after 15 years of turbulent and unstable play, will continue for at least another six years. This is something that Notre Dame desperately needed once the Weis experiment failed.

While Notre Dame has still had its fair share of struggles under Coach Kelly (most of which came under the first couple of years) he has built a roster and a program that now looks to compete for a title or achance to compete for one each year.

Perhaps the USC “rumors” (if you want to call them that) and the NFL talk this past offseason were another ploy for this extension. Perhaps, and if that was the case than- SO WHAT?!

This is the world we live in, and OUR world got much better. Coaching stability is as important as signing five star players, and maybe more so as the coach outlasts the player.

Brian Kelly has made the Notre Dame coaching job a much better job to have, and if his legacy continues on an upward incline and he is done after the 2021 season, that just makes the program that much more likely to land another great coach and continue to play for championships.

That’s fantastic. That’s a game-changer, and one that we have waited on for a while. Some will scoff at this and complain as complainers do, but there is no one better that can do the job or even wants the job. Brian Kelly can do it, and he wants to do it. I’m excited, and you should be too.