Bruce Feldman had an excellent piece on Brian Kelly and Notre Dame this morning, the remnants of a magazine article he did on Kelly and the Irish for this month’s ESPN The Magazine.
While the magazine piece had a lot of great tidbits about the timeline and hiring of Kelly by athletic director Jack Swarbrick, his blog entry lists six factors that opened Feldman’s eyes to why Brian Kelly is such a great fit.
While I found myself agreeing with just about every word Feldman wrote, his third point about Kelly understanding the big-picture stuff that surrounds Notre Dame resonated.
This from his article:
The view that “We’re ND. We’re different” often rubs people the wrong way. But honestly, after spending some
time on and around the campus talking to people about Notre Dame, it is
legitimately different. I’m sure a lot of people won’t like to hear
that, but the connection to the campus is unique among all the other
college I’ve visited in terms of service and genuine respect for the
place. How that mindset meshes with winning more football games — and,
potentially, national titles — is something I found fascinating.I’d heard people talk about this type of thing, but I didn’t truly “get
it” until I spent some time with Kelly, offensive guard/ND law student
Chris Stewart and Carolyn Woo, the dean of the Notre Dame business
school.Kelly had told me a big challenge for his staff was changing what his
new players’ priorities were. “So the biggest thing that we’ve changed
is their way of thinking on a day-to-day basis,” he explained. “It’s
that they’re here for Notre Dame first and foremost. Not that they’re
No. 3 on Mel Kiper’s Big Board at outside linebacker. That’s fine, but
that can’t be the No. 1 reason you’re at Notre Dame.”I asked if his approach might be different if he were taking over at, say, Wisconsin or Oklahoma?
“Totally different answer,” he says, adding that he’d have been fine
with that mentality: “But it’s not Wisconsin. It’s Notre Dame. So the
environment here on a day-to-day basis is different. I’m not saying it’s
better; it’s not worse. Some people say special. That’s fine. It’s on
campus. It’s living in the dorms. It’s 17 chapels on campus. Therefore,
you have to be invested in that. We didn’t understand how those
principles really affected us when we went to work every day.”I still didn’t buy the correlation until asking Kelly another question about it and he went one step further.
“How does Navy beat some of the teams that they beat?” he asked. “They
beat them on the character that they have, their discipline, their
attention to detail, their love for their country, the passion in the
way that they play. Notre Dame has a lot of those trappings. We just
have to be able to play on those. It can’t be just ‘I’m going to recruit
a bunch of four- and five-star star guys and roll the ball out.’
College football doesn’t play that way. We have to be able to get our
players playing with a sense of pride and a sense of ownership in Notre
Dame. That’s what we’re working on right now.”
Trading emails with Bruce this morning, I got the sense that he was surprised that he felt the uniqueness of campus; the fact that Notre Dame was, actually, different from many of the places and big time college football campuses he’s been. While Charlie Weis was always aware that his alma mater was unique, part of me thinks that his era — defined largely by the gigantic steps taken to get the facilities on campus up to par with other college football goliaths — unnecessarily tried to play down that uniqueness, merely happy to join the arms race by talking up schematic advantages and an NFL pedigree.
Feldman spoke to Dean Carolyn Woo who echoed the idea of doing things “The Notre Dame Way,” and also spoke with Stewart about the differences since the regime change.
“Our students’ lives, their sense of who they are, what they can do, and
how well prepared they are, is our job,” Woo later told me. “It’s very
important to me that we push ourselves to do the best by our students
and to do it ‘The Notre Dame Way,’ which is winning always the right
way. That took [the business school] to No. 1 [in the nation]. We didn’t
start out at No. 1; Business Week did not do rankings of the
undergraduate programs ’til five years ago. We entered the rankings at
No. 3. We were very focused on what we needed to do for the students, and that got us where we were.”
“We’re taking a more a holistic approach,” Stewart said. “Stuff we’ve
never done before. We spend two hours every day. We’re giving back. I’m
working with first- to third-graders. We have guys working with older
kids. We have guys at the boys and girls clubs working with high
school-age kids. We talk about leadership and service to the community,
how to give back and be good citizens and not just football players.
Stuff comes out as we’re talking with guys from different backgrounds
and what we all bring to the team. It really helps the team come
together even more.”
Obviously Brian Kelly will ultimately be defined by what he does on the football field. But if Feldman’s observations are any indication, he’s starting to sway the masses.
