There are some very ugly facts surrounding Notre Dame football, the most distressing being that the Irish have now lost seven of their last eight football games dating back to last season.
And while there are certainly more than a few sane and logical arguments to be made in support of ditching your blue-and-gold and taking up another pastime during the fall months, two of the senior voices covering Notre Dame football made some excellent points in the aftermath of the ugly Stanford loss.
The South Bend Tribune’s Eric Hansen had this to say when deconstructing the Irish after four football games:
The only commodities ND first-year head football coach Brian Kelly is in danger of losing at this juncture are bandwagon-jumpers.
The
best thing the Cardinal did Saturday on Kelly’s behalf was show him
that his 1-3 football team isn’t just a mistake or two, a blown coverage
or three, a missed block or four away from being “return to glory”
good.There’s some retooling, maybe reinvention, required to change the trajectory of this season.
The foundation is in order. The things that made Kelly the right fit for the program haven’t changed — 19 years of prior head coaching experience at the college level,
knowledge of both sides of the ball, ability to move players to new
positions and develop them there, and the ability to think on his feet.
It may come as a surprise to some Notre Dame fans (or perhaps not after actually watching him coach), but Kelly has had slow starts and losing streaks.
There haven’t been many of those rough spots — not as a head coach
anyway. Kelly has experienced two four-game losing streaks in his
career, both at Grand Valley State, preceding his two Division II
national titles there. One started at the tail end of 1998 and extended
through the first three games of 1999. The other started at the end of
1999 and finished up in 2000.He’s never lost five in a row, for those thinking ahead to the Oct. 9 home game against Pittsburgh.
Kelly
has been 1-3 three times before, though. and nothing close to
apocalyptic happened. In 2005, his Central Michigan team followed that
start with a four-game winning streak. In 1999, his 1-3 Grand Valley
team won four of its next five to finish 5-4. And in 2000, his 1-3 team
actually started 0-3. From there, Kelly won 20 games in a row and 40 of
his next 41.
Those are reassuring trends for Irish fans, though nothing would make people feel better than a step in the actual right direction.
Meanwhile, veteran scribe Lou Somogyi of BlueandGold.com reached into the mailbag to help quell reader anger.
From Somogyi:
After dropping to 1-3 under a new head coach that
was and is still considered the man who will turn it around for Notre
Dame football, we received the following mail from subscribers.
A doctor in Kansas City wrote: “It’s not that we’re not used to losing
(how couldn’t we be). It’s about the weekly exercise in losing ugly.
Notre Dame football equates with buffoonery. I’ll check back in five or
ten years.”From Columbus, Ohio: One reader who is constantly
mocked by Ohio State Buckeyes fans asked, “Is this the new leader we
were looking forward to? I doubt it.”
From Pennsylvania, our top state for subscribers: “The strength of the
team is the wide receivers. Why didn’t the ball get to any of them?
Notre Dame looked very disorganized.”
From Brooklyn: “Let’s end the hypocrisy right now. If [Charlie Weis] was still coaching the Irish, the record would be the same… the Irish would still be committing uncorrected errors. The press would be rightfully all over [Weis]. Why the double standard? Why has the press fawned all over [Brian Kelly]?By the way … those letters are from 1986. I just
took a little liberty with the last one by inserting Charlie Weis’ name
instead of Gerry Faust in the brackets, and Brian Kelly instead of Lou Holtz. The fourth game blowout came at Alabama, 28-10, a game where three Irish quarterbacks (Steve Beuerlein, Terry Andrysiak and Steve Belles) each threw an interception. That hadn’t happened again until … well, this season with Kelly versus Michigan (Dayne Crist, Tommy Rees and Nate Montana).Nobody is saying Kelly will turn it around like
Holtz. Nobody is saying he can’t. All we’re trying to show is that
whether you’re a future Hall of Fame head coach or one who is aspiring
to attain such a stature (and statue), the road toward prosperity seldom
comes smoothly paved. And instant results by some segments of the
fandom are expected now just as they were then.
The travails continued for Holtz that year when he and the Irish lost
10-9 at home to a mediocre Pitt team that would finish 5-5-1. That
dropped Notre Dame to 1-7 overall in its last eight games — just like
now.
As Somogyi points out — Lou Holtz wasn’t Lou Holtz when he got the Notre Dame job. And after starting 1-3, he was just another guy that may have won before coming to South Bend, but wasn’t up to the task of waking up the echoes.
The point is, we’ll find out if Brian Kelly will win at Notre Dame soon enough. For some fans, it’s already taking too long. For those with some patience, find strength that there’s logic in your beliefs.