Editor’s Note: This story is included in The Athletic’s Best of 2021. View the full list.
The pre-dawn meeting started right on time. Jack Swarbrick, the Notre Dame athletic director now in charge of finding a new football coach, walked into the front of Isban Auditorium of the Guglielmino Athletics Complex at 7 a.m. Tuesday and introduced Brian Kelly, the ex-coach who called his players together for one last goodbye.
Advertisement
The room was quiet, save for a few players shuffling in their seats and a few faint “good mornings” to Kelly as he walked to the front of the room.
There, according to a video recording of the meeting obtained by The Athletic, Kelly delivered a three-minute, 42-second speech without notes in which he thanked his players, did not mention his new destination by name and explained how he felt like it was time for him to take on a new challenge:
“Good morning guys. Thanks for getting up here in short order, short notice. As you know, I sent out a text last night trying to give you as much notice as possible given the circumstances that we all know that happened relative to social media and information getting out. And look, I know we’ve been through this together — I recruited virtually everybody in this room — and I want to be able to tell you, face to face, why we’re at where we’re at. And that is, very simply, that the past 12 years have been the most incredible 12 years of my life, for me and my family, being here at Notre Dame. Magical in what we’ve been able to build with the most incredible student-athletes, the ones that I’m looking at right now.
“And so many times, people looking for a reason to blame, or it was a reason for something — there was nothing here but first-class in everything that Notre Dame has done for me and my family. I saw my time here as a blessing, working with incredible men on a day-to-day basis. But there comes a time where you look in your life for another opportunity, and I felt like it was time in my life for another challenge. And I saw that opportunity in a very short window and felt that it was best for me and my family to pursue a new challenge. And so there’s no one to blame. There’s nobody that’s at fault. Nobody did anything wrong. You guys have been the backbone of this program in what you’ve accomplished and will continue to do that.
Advertisement
“I think you’re one of the four-best teams in the country. Jack is going to get somebody that will continue to lead this program in incredible fashion. I don’t know what it holds for us moving forward, but I hope to heck it means that you’re playing for the national championship, because you absolutely deserve it.
“So from the bottom of my heart, I want to thank every one of you for giving me this opportunity to speak to you directly, because you don’t get that chance very often, and to thank you for allowing me to pursue what I love to do, and that is develop 18- to 21-year-olds. And you will continue to achieve at the highest level and have great success no matter what moves forward for you. So again, thank you, I love each and every one of you, and for me, more than anything else, it’s a sad day, but one where I know that each one of you are gonna do great things and you’ve got more to accomplish. So I wish everybody here the very best, and thank you for the opportunity that you’ve given me and my family. Thank you guys, appreciate it.”
He took no questions. He didn’t meet with the staff members who were present. He walked toward the door to his right, then made a long, awkward climb up the auditorium stairs, passing his former team on his way out — on to start the next act of his coaching career, leaving Notre Dame to pick up the pieces and process everything that had just unfolded.
The room was dead silent.
The situation was awkward enough to begin with. News had broken less than 12 hours earlier that Kelly, the winningest coach in Notre Dame history, was leaving for LSU. To say that folks around the Irish were stunned would be an understatement.
The surprise was three-pronged: Kelly, in his 12th year with the Irish, had publicly stated his intentions to retire in South Bend just seven days earlier. Kelly, who had raved about Notre Dame’s institutional alignment any chance he got, was leaving for an LSU program that, for all of its on-field success, has regularly been a blueprint for administrative dysfunction. Kelly, who had done everything but win a national championship at Notre Dame, was leaving the program six days before the College Football Playoff field would be announced — a field that may very well end up including the Irish.
Advertisement
Throw in the fact that Kelly’s deal with LSU would be for an average annual salary of $9.5 million — nothing to sneeze at, but far off the $250 million “fairy godmother” money that he had joked about during his denial of other job prospects one week earlier — and nothing quite added up for those at Notre Dame who thought they knew their coach well.
When The Athletic first reported at 5:18 p.m. Monday that LSU was targeting Kelly, the jury was still out on whether or not Kelly was legitimately interested in taking the job. Kelly had won big everywhere, but he had no ties to the South. He had proven to be a master program builder, but at 60 years old, the appetite for starting over someplace else figured to be small. He had been a great developer of talent, but he had never personally recruited to the level of Playoff regulars.
Still, multiple people close to Kelly pegged the odds of him going to LSU at “50-50” by the time The Athletic’s report came out. Multiple Notre Dame administrators privately dismissed the notion of Kelly leaving, assuming that this was a leverage play. At the crux of Kelly’s long-term wants at Notre Dame were upgrades in tangible resources, most notably a long-awaited expansion of the Gug, the daily operations complex of the football program that had opened in 2005 and has had zero non-cosmetic updates since.
A little more than two-and-a-half hours after the initial report, at 7:51 p.m., Yahoo Sports reported that Kelly was leaving. Most of his assistant coaches, out on the road recruiting, learned the news via the media and were absolutely floored. The same was true of those back in South Bend, who had not heard a word from Kelly. Swarbrick, who had been scheduled to travel to Dallas for Wednesday’s Playoff meetings, would later say at an on-campus news conference Tuesday that Kelly called him Monday night to inform him that he was resigning. Swarbrick relayed the news to Irish assistant coaches, telling them to stay on the road recruiting as is, to take a deep breath and to calm the nerves of the prospects that they were visiting.
At 10:08 p.m., Kelly sent out a message to the team apologizing for not being able to deliver the news himself, telling the players that his love for them was “limitless,” and saying he was flying back to campus to meet with them at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
“I was not surprised,” Swarbrick said Tuesday of Kelly’s call to him. “There had been enough in the weeks leading up that gave me a pretty strong sense that there might be other things that were attracting Brian, and then of course social media got very active during the day yesterday.”
If taken at face value, that sentiment was unique among those around Notre Dame.
As one program employee close to Kelly said to The Athletic in the hours after the news broke: “You think you’re surprised?”
Throughout the fall, Kelly’s name was regularly mentioned by talking heads as a possible candidate for USC’s head coaching job, which came open after the second week of the season. Legitimate or not, the noise at least reached the point where, during his weekly Monday news conference to preview the Irish’s regular-season finale at Stanford, Kelly was asked directly about USC, and asked if he would ever leave Notre Dame aside from retirement.
Advertisement
“No,” he said on Nov. 22. “I mean, look, I think Mike Tomlin had the best line, right? Unless that fairy godmother comes by with that $250 million check, my wife would want to take a look at it first. I’d have to run it by her.”
By that point, LSU had already made overtures to Kelly, multiple people with knowledge of the situation told The Athletic, but Kelly had said that he was not interested. Still, in the time between the Tigers’ initial flirtations several weeks ago and the time that Kelly accepted the job, Kelly had requested a meeting with Swarbrick and Notre Dame president Rev. John Jenkins that ended up never happening. During that same stretch, Michigan State signed second-year coach Mel Tucker — amid the first winning season of his head-coaching career — to a 10-year, $95 million deal that reset the negotiating bar for seemingly every coach and agent in the business.
Kelly’s Notre Dame deal, signed in 2020, ran through the 2024 season.
In the two days since Kelly left Notre Dame, multiple people close to Kelly have wondered aloud why Notre Dame didn’t recognize the current market and, with so many big jobs open around the country, take a more proactive approach to meeting Kelly’s needs and eliminating any doubt that the winningest active FBS coach was truly valued at one of the sport’s iconic programs.
Conversely, multiple people at Notre Dame simply cannot believe that Kelly — who engineered Notre Dame’s rebuild, who has this year’s team at 11-1, who literally just built a house that is one block from campus — would burn his legacy with a move like this.
Be it sour grapes, genuine befuddlement or perhaps the full truth coming to light, a common theme emerged Tuesday from those inside the Gug: You saw who Brian Kelly truly is.
When Kelly finished addressing the players for the final time, Swarbrick offered a few more words, saying that there would not be an interim head coach — words that he would relay publicly less than three hours later at his news conference.
In-between, at 9:02 a.m., LSU made the hire of Kelly official. In Kelly’s introduction video — which, it should be noted, was a heavily edited, purple-and-gold tinted clip of soundbites from his time at Notre Dame — he said, “The expectation for me was to be a legitimate contender for championships.”
Advertisement
That line, with or without context, speaks directly to the prevailing attitude of Notre Dame players on Tuesday morning. There was some frustration, yes, but that quickly morphed into defiance.
Players had a chip on their shoulders the rest of the day, multiple program sources said, as they believed that their coach — the guy who “recruited virtually everybody in this room” — did not think they were good enough to win a national championship.
How else were they supposed to interpret it, after a dominant second half of the season and with the program still possessing a chance to make its third Playoff appearance in the last four years? The program later tweeted a video of head strength and conditioning coach Matt Balis passionately implying that he will stay with the program, as he talked through the emotions of the day with his players.
Players, largely fed up with the distant, CEO-type approach of Kelly, made it abundantly clear throughout the day to Swarbrick and to anyone else who would listen that they wanted 35-year-old defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman to become their next head coach, sources told The Athletic. Freeman was scheduled to meet with Swarbrick on Wednesday, sources said, and though there are many steps between here and there, Freeman’s preferred choice of offensive coordinator is current OC Tommy Rees, the 29-year-old former Irish quarterback. Rees met with Swarbrick late Tuesday night to discuss his options, sources said, and the idea of Rees being the play caller for a defensive-minded head coach is appealing, given the autonomy and success that recent Irish defensive coordinators (Freeman, Clark Lea, Mike Elko) have had under the offensive-minded Kelly. In short, Rees could keep the same job title at Notre Dame, but in practice it would be different enough to allow him to grow.
There is a genuine belief among a large contingent of current Irish assistants that this program is in excellent position to succeed immediately, and that having familiar young, fresh blood at the head of the program could provide the jolt that Notre Dame needs to seriously compete for national titles, and not just compete for Playoff berths.
Kelly and LSU have made hard pushes for Freeman and Rees to join their former boss in Baton Rouge, with sources saying that Freeman is staring at an offer that will make him the highest-paid defensive coordinator in the country (north of $2.5 million per year) and Rees is looking at a deal that will make him the highest-paid offensive coordinator in the SEC (north of $1.2 million). Kelly also reached out to former Irish and current Ohio State assistant Tony Alford about joining his staff, sources said, but Alford chose to remain with the Buckeyes.
The clock is ticking on a decision — either by the coaches themselves on LSU, or by Notre Dame to move forward under the Freeman regime. For now, the state of Notre Dame football is in the shape that Brian Kelly left it in, a status that doubled as a fill-in for Kelly’s voicemail message when The Athletic tried to reach him for clarity.
“All circuits are busy. Please try your call again later.”
(Photo: Darren Yamashita / USA Today)