Strength & Conditioning Change At Notre Dame

On the heels of a 4-8 season, the upheaval in Notre Dame’s football office this December has continued with a change in the strength and conditioning program.

Earlier this week, BlueandGold.com was told by two different sources that strength and conditioning coordinator Paul Longo would no longer retain his post. The wording was different from each source— one indicated “reassigned” while the other said “demoted” — but the end result expected is that while Longo might have a different role in Notre Dame’s Guglielmino Athletics Complex, a new strength and conditioning coordinator will be hired.

Longo has been with head coach Brian Kelly on all three of his Division I coaching stops at Central Michigan (2004-06), Cincinnati (2007-09) and Notre Dame (2010-present). A 1983 graduate of Wayne State, Longo began his career at Wisconsin in 1987 as the assistant strength coach, and he was at Iowa 16 years from 1988-2003, including head football strength coach from 1993-98 and Olympic sports strength coach from 1999-2003.

This month, BlueandGold.com analyst Bryan Driskell reported that “at the heart of many of Notre Dame’s issues are failures in the strength and conditioning program. … Many of Notre Dame’s older players have actually stalemated or regressed from a functional power standpoint during their careers.”

Also, while the Fighting Irish often started strong in most games this year — including a 14-0 lead in the first seven minutes against Duke, a 10-0 halftime advantage versus Stanford, 17-0 and 24-7 first-half cushions against Virginia Tech, all eventual home losses — it had a proclivity to wilt as the game progressed. They were outscored 81-52 in the fourth quarter — and tallied only 22 points in the fourth quarter over the final eight games, including six in the closing minute at USC when the 45-27 outcome was decided much earlier.

The change is one of many this month, with the potential of more to come.

• Wake Forest’s Mike Elko will be the new defensive coordinator. Former Irish defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder was fired Sept. 25, and replaced by defensive analyst Greg Hudson, while also receiving much help from current linebackers coach Mike Elston.

• Special teams coordinator Scott Booker was replaced by former Notre Dame special teams coordinator Brian Polian (2005-09), who was Nevada’s head coach from 2013-16.

• Offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach Mike Sanford was hired as the head coach at Western Kentucky.

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