It's pretty convenient to only look at two years of a coach's nine year tenure, especially when one of the two years was a 12-1. It's also very shortsighted, irresponsible and homeristic thinking, but as you can see I can do it too....and have, just to present a comparison between our coach 'Brian Kelly' and this alleged Kelly 2.0 of your imagination.
So the coach we had in years 3 & 4 is a whopping one game better now in years 8 & 9, but you're telling us "Notre Dame did basically get a new coach prior to 2017". This is the ultimate four year old 'he changed the way he wears his hair, so now he's a different person' mentality. It completely obfuscates the true picture of his performance as a head coach, which the shit show from 2016 IS a part of.
It also leaves out another similarity between our coach then and ""our couch"" now:
•In '12 and '13 three of Kelly's five losses were by double digits to the tune of 11, 14, 28
•In '17 and '18 three of Kelly's four losses were by double digits to the tune of 18, 27, 33
-So our selectively brand new coach's two year peak equals an .846 win percentage and in 75% of his losses he was beaten by double digits with an avg margin of loss by 26 pts
-While our selectively old and ""basically replaced"" coach's two year peak equals an .808 win percentage with only 60% of his losses coming by double digits with an avg margin of loss by only 18 pts
Hmm, one could almost argue that we shoulda just kept the old guy.
But really, this isn't the most significant thing your Kelly 2.0 stupidity ignores. The most telling part of this, showing he isn't a changed or new coach, is that none of the changes that were made were by his own decision...they were force fed to him by the admin. He's the same coach now that he was then, he just had a leash put on him and was forced to hire new assistants. How noble..