Who Will be the Next Coach at Notre Dame

This idea has been bandied about in the Midwest too. There's a notion among some that the Big East will eventually split between its basketball and football schools.

If so, schools like Xavier, Dayton, Creighton, Bradley, Saint Louis and a few others might join with the non-basketball Big East schools to form some sort of super private school league with Marquette, DePaul, Georgetown, perhaps Notre Dame, etc.

Probably won't ever happen, but its rumored from time-to-time.

 

So you suggest he should have said, "All right, any Notre Dame questions?" I'm sure this board would have really endorsed that move. Riiiiiight.

I'm sure nobody on here has ever left a job. Jesus.

 

Most of us gave more than one hour's notice when we left jobs. And if, say, our local paper's home team was in a BCS Bowl, or had just won an NFL conference championship, we probably wouldn't leave before the big event, either.

 

Sounds like the real divide here is over the significance of a bowl game, and it's a tough gap to bridge.

 

It depends, Waylon. For this team and school, the bowl game has a lot of significance. If Cincinnati had gone 9-3, and was headed to the Sun Bowl or something, and Notre Dame still wanted Kelly, it wouldn't seem as unseemly, and probably the team wouldn't be as upset.

 

Simple solution is to bump the bowl season up a few weeks so there's only 2-3 weeks of downtime instead of 5-6. Then install a coaching hiring freeze during that time. You're free to fire anyone you want but you can't talk to any other coaches until after the bowl games.

Could you imagine a basketball coach leading his team to the elite eight and and then just saying "okay that's enough you guys take it from here I'm outta here." It's absurd.

Hard to blame Kelly for seizing a better opportunity. Easy to blame the system though.

 

There's an implicit understanding, or should be, that you stay on deck until the vessel has been landed. This is called professionalism. Some might also call it courtesy. At some point after the coach-as-superstar transition, it became OK to give these guys a pass for chronically breaking their word. Well, it won't do.

 

What he said.

 

Call it the Catholic league, if you will. Makes a lot of sense. Those schools (be they currently in the Big East or not) have a lot more in common with each other than they do with the likes of South Florida, Cincinnati and UConn. As for Notre Dame's involvement, it would let them stay independent in football, and make some sense in hoops, though their Olympic sports would probably suffer.

On the other hand, there are more rumblings about the Big 10 trying again to become 12...

http://sports.espn.go.com/chicago/ncf/news/story?id=4735336

 

I agree with you somewhat, but I think the coaches are put in a tough position. If Kelly decides to stick around and coach Cincy through the bowl game, ND may not want to wait that long. They might say "fine we'll pursue someone else then." And then Kelly misses out on a huge opportunity.

So Kelly is left with basically two options: leave early and hear all the heat he's hearing or do "the right thing" and possibly miss out on the job. He's between a rock and a hard place. That's why I think the NCAA is at fault and needs to do something about this strange down period.

Kelly was just striking while the iron is hot and taking advantage of an opportunity to better his career. That's the market we live in.

 

He's done this at two other stops, and he might do it at his "dream job," too.

Enough is enough with this.

 

Do we even know that leaving now was Kelly's call? Urban Meyer stayed at Utah through the bowl game. If Kelly was willing to do so and Cincy wouldn't let him, does that change anyone's opinion? I think he's fine either way, but I'm curious about what the bleeding hearts think.

I also think congrats are in order to our own LJB, who apparently has done the honorable thing and held onto the paper route he has had since age 12.