Brian Kelly will NEVER win a natty at Notre Dame so long as Nick Saban is still at Bama. Every time he has faced Bama he has been blown to smithereens. Make no mistake, he is a superior coach, and he gets top recruiting classes at ND, but his record versus the truly big dogs is not impressive, and he has been blistered by profoundly unhappy Domer fans since the very beginning of his tenure there. Granted, the Domer fan base is preposterously demanding and even more spoiled than USC's. Would I take him over Clay Helton? Is the Pope Catholic? But we are NOW in a position to go after significantly better candidates than Kelly to my thinking.
Futhermore he is close to 60 years old, and has shown conspicuous signs of being worn to a frazzle by the stress of coaching at such a high level. I am not saying he is washed up, but I believe he is a tad past his prime as a top notch college coach, and perhaps even considering retiring before too long, which would make many Domer fans giddy with delight. We would get him on the rebound, and all things considered, he is not in my top twenty as a satifactory replacement for Clay Helton. If he left ND, they would be going after all the same folk Mike Bohn is now considering, and they would offer guys like Luke Fickell and Matt Campbell a more satisfactory destination than we would, those fellows both diehard midwesterners, not necessarily all that anxious to come out to L.A. in the first place, and not necessarilly good fits emotionally out here in La La land as, for example, I think James Franklin would be.