Notre Dame Contract Extension With Brian Kelly Has Clear Mission
This weekend’s 27-13 victory versus Duke officially marked the start of head coach Brian Kelly’s 11th season at Notre Dame. That put him in a four-way tie for second place with national champions and College Football Hall of Fame inductees Frank Leahy (1941-43, 1946-53), Ara Parseghian(1964-74) and Lou Holtz (1986-96).
Only the legendary Knute Rockne’s 13-year reign from 1918-30 is longer before it was tragically ended at age 43 from a fatal plane crash.
With the University of Notre Dame’s pre-game announcement on Saturday that Kelly’s current contract that runs through 2021 was extended three years to the end of the 2024 campaign, if all goes as planned, Kelly’s 15 years with the Irish will surpass Rockne’s 94-year reign for the longest tenure at the program.
That’s a feat he didn’t quite envision earlier in his career. When it was announced in September 2014 that Notre Dame had scheduled 2022-23 meetings with Ohio State in football, Kelly joked he would be looking forward to those games — while on a beach in a tropical climate, with an adult beverage in hand.
While there are no official “term limits” as the football head coach at Notre Dame, the demands of the position have physically drained and emotionally exhausted his predecessors after 11 years. Leahy was only 45 when he stepped down in 1953 with four national titles, while Parseghian was 51 when he retired in 1974 with two consensus championships and a shared one.
Holtz, who won the most recent national title in 1988 and nearly missed on two others in 1989 and 1993, was the oldest Fighting Irish head coach to hold the position, 59 years and 11 months when he resigned in 1996. Kelly will turn 59 on Oct. 25, the day after the Pitt game on the road.
Prior to Holtz, the previous oldest coach to lead Notre Dame was Dan Devine, who won the 1977 national championship but stepped down three years later, just after his 56th birthday.
“I’ve been very fortunate,” commented Kelly during his half-hour meeting with the media via Zoom on Monday. “I’m blessed that the university has given that trust in me to continue to lead this program. I feel blessed to have that opportunity knowing the great history and tradition of Notre Dame football. To be entrusted with that, I take that obviously quite serious.”
With such extensions, one of the primary questions is how much fire remains in the belly. Under his watch, Notre Dame made it to the BCS Championship Game in 2012 (a 42-14 defeat to Alabama) and the four-team College Football Playoff in 2018 (a 30-3 setback to Clemson) with 12-0 regular seasons.
Since 2012, the only other teams that have both played both for a national title and been in the CFP are Alabama, Clemson, Florida State and Ohio State.
Over the past three seasons (2017-19), Notre Dame produced the sixth-best record in the 130-team Football Bowl Subdivision with a 33-6 mark. The final frontier remains capturing the school’s first national title since 1988.
“When we discussed this, I needed to have the energy, the enthusiasm and the want to to continue to lead this program, and really feel like there was more to accomplish, which I do,” Kelly said. “All those things had to align — and it still doesn’t mean I can’t have a Mai Tai in July along the beach. We can still do both.
“It still needed to be, from my perspective, things I needed to and wanted to accomplish and where I believe our program could still achieve. … That is still the ultimate goal, and our mission is to win a national championship.”
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