Notre Dame needs to invest in upgrading the football facilities
While Notre Dame is as prestigious as it gets when it comes to college football, they have to look at upgrading the football facilities.
Most Notre Dame fans will tell you today that they’re happy Brian Kelly left because it gave the team a chance to come together and for the administration to promote Marcus Freeman to head coach. The excitement and energy he’s brought have helped to keep fans from confronting why Kelly left in the first place.
Brian Kelly left because of money, yes. More importantly, he left because he is obsessed with how his legacy as a coach is going to be viewed. Yes, he is the winningest coach in Notre Dame history, but he had never found postseason success in South Bend.
He, undoubtedly, felt that significant postseason success, including a National Championship, wasn’t going to be possible. So, he went somewhere he thought it would be easier to win a National Championship, for the sake of his reputation in the long term.
A key part of why Kelly feels Notre Dame isn’t in a position to win a National Championship in the modern era is the program lacks the facilities to do so.
It’s important to remember that modern recruitment is an arms race. The team that can offer the most to recruits gets the best players. It isn’t about loyalty or who a player grew up rooting for at all. Can a program get you to the NFL? What are the benefits of being a football player on campus? Which school has the nicest facilities to use for football players?
This means the top programs tend to spend excessive amounts of money to outstrip one another. For instance, LSU turned their locker room into this:
https://twitter.com/FOS/status/1153135644811640838
Like it or not, players want to compete in the nicest facilities possible. Notre Dame doesn’t have the nicest facilities possible. In fact, it has some of the most disappointing. Compared to the average ACC school, Notre Dame has poor facilities. Schools in the Big 10, like Northwestern, blow Notre Dame away.
Notre Dame must upgrade the football facilities
This is an issue that the school administration has largely tried to ignore over the years. They have wanted to find ways to win, without this investment. It’s a refusal to invest that reaches beyond facilities, of course, and into the details like assistant coach salary pool. That’s why Mike Elko left when he did because they wouldn’t invest long-term in him.
Yes, Notre Dame is more than a football program. Notre Dame is a world-class education with unlimited resources that make the decision one that helps you for your entire life. It’s a name that carries mystique and conjures glorious images. It’s just not enough to recruit a team with enough depth of talent to beat the Alabamas and Clemsons of the world.
Now, Notre Dame has a chance to take pride in itself and invest in its facilities. Put the money into building the program into the image all alumni and fans have for Notre Dame. Make it more practical to win a National Championship. Make sure that one of the best schools in the country has the resources invested into its proud football program.
In an article that Marcus Freeman wrote for the Players Tribune, he explained it simply, “We need to enhance — but we don’t need to change.”
If you’re a blue blood you invest in facilities. You pay for private travel in recruiting and put together massive recruiting departments. You spend money to keep assistants and make sure you always have the best assistants possible. These are things Notre Dame hasn’t done in the past but has a chance to do again in a new era of Irish football. If Notre Dame is willing to do so, the Irish will find national success again. Otherwise, the SEC will dominate forever.