Some might think the best thing for former Notre Dame football coach Brian Kelly to do would be to lay low. He hasn’t had a great go of it since being fired by LSU last fall, and it seems like every time he does an interview, he says something that just leads to even more people taking shots at him. And yet, earlier this week, Kelly did yet another wide-ranging interview where he attempted to cover why he left South Bend for Baton Rouge with another coat of paint. It’s unlikely his latest attempt to blame everyone else for what he said will go over much better.
Kelly spoke to The Independent Podcast with Pete Sampson and Matt Fortuna and, unsurprisingly, most of the discussion revolved around his time with the Fighting Irish. In that discussion, he tried to claim people misunderstood his explanation for leaving ND for the Tigers.
“I think I was mischaracterized only in the sense that I didn't leave Notre Dame because they couldn't win a national championship. Those words never came out of my mouth,” Kelly said when asked if he would do anything differently about the way he did leave the Fighting Irish. “What I said is if I'm going to leave, I'm going to go to a place that can win a national championship.”
“And that was perceived as being, oh, he doesn't think he can win one here.”
Brian Kelly says Notre Dame exit comments were mischaracterized
In Kelly’s defense, there were other ways to take what he said. It is possible he didn’t realize how someone would react to saying he wanted to go somewhere that could win a national title. On the other hand, it’s not hard to get from Point A to Point B and decide the comment meant he wanted to “go somewhere” where he could win a national title and that meant the place he was at couldn’t accomplish that.
It’s not an unfair assumption to make. The former Notre Dame coach has known for quite some time about the inference his comments caused. He could have tried to really change the perception of his comments for years. He didn’t make that much of an effort.
It’s also not surprising that, if it wasn’t clear before that he felt like the victim of his own comments, he wanted to hammer that home with what he said next. In fact, he made it clear it was everyone else’s fault for his public perception when he went from Notre Dame to LSU.
“So look, I think we all know this, and now dipping my toes into the media a little bit, there's never a great time. The timing stinks, and it stinks mostly for the players. But it's not easy on the coaches either,” Kelly said (cue the world’s tiniest violin).
“It's a difficult process where one school is trying to get themselves up and off the mat, and the other school is like, wait a second, where are you going? So it's never an easy situation. I don't think I'm the first one that's been caught in that situation.”
While Brian Kelly isn’t wrong that he’s not the first coach to jump schools, he might need to look closer at why he was made into such a villain when it was his time to make the move. Notre Dame fans aren’t the first to dislike a former coach, but the degree to which he’s disliked isn’t all that usual and isn’t just because of a “bitter” fanbase.
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