Notre Dame is a coveted job for head coaches for a few obvious reasons.
It’s a brand. It’s not difficult to field winning teams. It has resources, top-level facilities and a unique national reach. It will pay well.
There’s a reason it has attracted a wide reach of sitting head coaches at other Power Five universities through the years. Brian Kelly has Notre Dame as stable as it has been since its last national title and has come the closest to winning one since Lou Holtz did in 1988.
The list of better jobs is relatively short, but still not negligible. ESPN’s Adam Rittenberg dubbed Notre Dame as one of eight “Tier 2 jobs” in college football, behind nine Tier 1 gigs, in his ranking of the Power Five jobs into five levels based on their advantages and disadvantages.
Tier 2 is defined as “very good location and/or access to top 300 recruits; no major limitations around facilities, coaching salaries or support staff; the ability to win a national title occasionally and compete regularly for conference championships; consistent top-20 finishes (recent or long term).”
Notre Dame is in there, along with Auburn, Florida State, Michigan, Oregon, Penn State, Texas A&M and Washington.
“Kelly is showing Notre Dame can contend for national titles, although there's clearly a step left to take,” Rittenberg wrote. “A new indoor practice facility helps and financial resources typically aren't lacking. Notre Dame still has national recruiting reach, but some coaches question the school's overall commitment to winning big.”
Going off Rittenberg’s criteria, Notre Dame is one of four Tier 2 teams to play in a national title game since 2012. Washington reached the 2016 College Football Playoff, but lost in the semifinals. Florida State and Auburn are the only Tier 2 teams to win national titles since 2010.
Kelly and Notre Dame played in the 2012 BCS title game and reached the College Football Playoff in 2018. Each trip ended with a blowout loss. Recruiting, while stable and often in the top 15, has not signed a top-10 class in Rivals’ rankings since 2013.
The perceived recruiting ceiling is regarded as the biggest obstacle in Notre Dame’s way to being a threat to win national titles instead of only playing for them. The Fighting Irish are 0-3 in BCS bowls under Kelly.
Still, the talent acquisition and overall situation has been enough to notch four 10-win seasons in the past five years and five overall since Kelly’s first season in 2010. Notre Dame has not lost to an unranked opponent since 2016. Its six losses since 2017 have all been to teams ranked at the time of the game and who finished the season in the AP top 20.
Three Tier 2 teams have not made the playoff since its 2014 inception. Rittenberg labeled Texas A&M as the biggest underachiever of Tier 2 and Florida State as the closest to moving up to Tier 1.
Rittenberg’s Tier 1 consists of Alabama, Clemson, Florida, Georgia, LSU, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Texas and USC. Those teams have combined for all but two of the national titles since 2001 and all of them since 2014.
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