Notre Dame Football: Where does Brian Kelly rank among CFB coaches?
Notre Dame Football: Where does Brian Kelly rank among college football coaches?
Who else is out there?
Lincoln Riley is an offensive genius, but he inherited a great situation and runs into the same issue as Kelly, he gets blown out in the Playoff. Ryan Day also inherited a great team, and how much can you really tell through two seasons.
Jim Harbaugh nearly got fired last season, everyone loves PJ Fleck, but he has a losing conference record on the easy side of the B1G 10, and Dan Mullen? He’s never won anything of significance at two SEC jobs now. Gary Patterson, meanwhile, had an amazing career but seems to have lost his touch of late.
You may need to look in non-traditional places.
In Ames, there is a coach, Matt Campbell, who has made the Iowa State Cyclones relevant for the first time in decades. This past season they won their first conference title since 1912, and their first major bowl win, ever. Similarly, Pat Fitzgerald has made a Northwestern team consistently good, though rarely great, where it’s hard to even be decent.
Those types of coaches are certainly exciting, but they’re also hard to judge, as they’re exceeding historic expectations and overcoming major issues, but they’re still not consistent top-10 teams.
The G5 is usually full of up-and-comers, but how do you compare success in the Sun Belt, like Jamey Chadwell and Billy Napier, with that of success at Notre Dame?
It’s almost impossible.
Oddly enough, the current Cincinnati coach, Luke Fickell, has one of the best arguments to being better than Kelly in the whole country. Fickell turned around a Cincinnati team in turmoil, gave them a unique personality, and has made them the top team in the AAC, which by some computer metrics is rated ahead of the PAC-12 and ACC in terms of quality.
In all of this, we know that only two coaches are definitively better than Brian Kelly; Saban and Swinney.
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You could argue several others, like Fisher, Riley, and Fickell. However, Kelly is a top-10 coach any way you slice it and is most likely a top-5 coach in the game today. It’s easy to get anxious, and want to find a way to take the next step forward, but remember how hard it is to be as good as Notre Dame is now, under Brian Kelly and appreciate the job he’s done.