5 reasons Notre Dame should fire Brian Kelly
By John Buhler
4. He’s below average for Notre Dame coaching standards
This expands a bit on what it means to coach at Notre Dame. The University thinks it’s a 10 to 11-win program. However, Notre Dame is a nine-win job in the College Football Playoff era.
It’s just too difficult for the Fighting Irish to be better than that most years. The academic standards make it difficult to recruit certain positions. They’re not the only school on television every Saturday anymore. Other teams can recruit nationally. Frankly, other teams use Catholicism and harsh Northern Indiana winters as tools to recruit against Notre Dame.
So let’s just admit that Notre Dame is a nine-win program on its own. It can sustain that on legacy and facilities alone. Unfortunately for Kelly, he’s not even hitting that new standard of Notre Dame football.
If Kelly goes 8-4 during this regular, meaning he doesn’t lose again, he will have averaged 8.42 wins per regular season in seven years in South Bend. Should Kelly get to just 6-6 this season, that drops his annual regular season win total average down to 8.14.
If we assume that 2012’s 12-0 campaign was an outlier for the current Notre Dame head coach, he will have averaged 7.8 regular season wins per year in five seasons. Assuming a 6-6 2016 regular season, that drops his win total per year down to 7.5 in six seasons, viewing 2012 as an outlier.
In short, Kelly is at least a win worse than what an average head coach should do at Notre Dame in this college football era. The Fighting Irish’s schedule is tough, but so are all Power 5 football program’s schedules. To be a blue-blood, you need to win nine regular season games annually. Notre Dame cannot do that under Kelly’s leadership. The data doesn’t lie.