Presently, there are 6 active coaches on D1 with two 12-0 seasons, and Brian Kelly is one of them.
It pains me a bit to say this since I felt kelly should have been fired after 2016. But the truth is that he is a pretty good coach. I felt that he proved this in the off season of 2016 when he made all of his coaching changes, and it was reinforced in this past off season when he was part part of the decision to say "see ya" to Mike Elko when he looked for a bidding war for his services and then himself promoted Clark Lea to D coordinator.
Kely is not an elite top 3 coach imo, and we have not yet run the table on a remaining schedule that i think is a lot tougher than people realize with FSU coming on strong finally and USC being 19-0 at home under Helton (they are a different team at home), But, I think Kelly is a lot better head coach than a lot of the sour ND "fans" give him credit for being.
Dont freak out if there is a mistake in these stats, because i did it quick.
Since joining their current teams (2010 for kelly, 2014 for Peterson)
Overall = 76-34 (kelly) - 69.1%, 43-19 - 69.4% (Peterson)
Vs. Teams that were ranked when they played them = 16-16 -50% (Kelly), 7-13-35% (Peterson)
Vs. Teams that were ranked at the end of the year = 13-22 - 37.1% (Kelly), 4-12-25% (Peterson)
If you wanted to go for both coaches since 2010, Petersons numbers obviously go up for total winning %, but not much for anything else considering his competition dropped significantly. So this isn't really the best comparison to do, because i could really go back to say 2008 and let kelly's states get inflated with wins an Cinnci, but regardless, since 2010 for both coaches.
Overall = 76-34 (kelly) - 69.1%, 86-28 - 75.4% (Peterson)
Vs. Teams that were ranked when they played them = 16-16 -50% (Kelly), 11-15-42.3% (Peterson)
Vs. Teams that were ranked at the end of the year = 13-22 - 37.1% (Kelly), 6-15-28.6% (Peterson)
So... given all this, i really find it a struggle to believe the people that think that Peterson would be this huge upgrade over Kelly... I think they are both really good coaches, but i think Kelly is better. Is he top 3? no, but you could easily argue he is top 10.
he made a terrible hire in Vangorder, and it cost him a ton of wins from 14-16, don't forget, in 2016, they had double digit leads in 3 of those game, and led at halftime in a couple more i believe. He has not always gotten the $$$ from the university to hire and keep good assistant coaches.
Regardless of his future here, ND should always respect what Kelly did here at ND. He brought this team back from nothing to making them relevant again. Made the team exciting, made kids want to consider coming here again, stadium upgrades, turf, practice facilities, locker rooms, etc. He had a huge part in all that. No 100% because of him, but a big part of it. He could leave tomorrow and i would have no hard feelings about his time here. I have wondered from time to time if both need some fresh air and it is time to move on, but he seems happy staying right now. He may not be everyone's favorite coach, but he is a damn good coach. Expecting anyone to come in here and win 11+ every single year, is foolish. i have always said that you need a coach at ND who averages 9-10 wins a year and every 4-5 years is in serious contention to make the playoffs. Also, when evaluation coaches and players, i always thought it was much more representative of their true stats when you remove their best game and their worst. You do that for kelly and he is average 9 wins a year. I would like this closer to 10, but i think he is coaching better now then when he started.
Dont forget, Holtz once when 5-6 and 6-5, Knute when 5-4, woody hayes went 4-5 and 3-5 (and was 6-6 in bowls), bob stoops is 9-9 in bowls, jimbo fisher when 5-6, paterno - 3-9, - meaning really good coaches can have bad years.
In my opinion, there aren't a ton of better options to replace him, and the ones who are, don't seem to be looking for the extra challenges that come with Notre Dame.
You can't just squint your eyes and pretend it didn't happen...it happened.
Washington ins't a place where coaches normally go to have great success...ty was good enough for a 10 win season at ND, at Washington he went.......... pause for affect .............. ZERO $ Twelve
I think Peterson at ND would be phenomenal...he gets more out of his teams than what the tangible talent he has would suggest they should be able to do. Who does that remind you of?
The NCAA is the one squinting and saying things "didn't happen." Vacating wins, in general, is an asinine practice. The games were played and ND won.
its not squinting your eyes and pretending it didn't happen. Its realizing its bull crap and looking at what he has really done. Official stats yes, he lost 21 victories, but those games were played and really happened and ND won them. If you are officially ranking coaches by wins as part of the NCAA, then yes you have to ignore those victories, but looking at stats like this - you include them.
happened on Kelly's watch. This isn't the NFL, this is college and fair or not in college the HC is responsible for the actions of his players. Kelly knows that and the history books know, and neither The University of Notre Dame nor the football coach named Brian Kelly ....EVER gets to claim those wins again.
You only include them if you're into squinting your eyes to show favor to Kelly...welcome to rality and the way facts work.
If it was found out Saban was paying all his players from a slush fund and they vacated everything since he started, I guaran-dam-tee you wouldn't be trying to give him credit for all his championships still.
Give me a freaking break!
you aren't listening. Yes those wins are vacated, they are done, i think its stupid, but its the way it is. All i was doing was listing the stats of what actually happened. Kelly won those 21 games, yes they were taken away, but it doesn't change what really happened. When comparing their resumes, you should include those. When comparing overall winning percentage for the NCAA records, you remove it... If you want to ignore it, then you are just squinting your eyes to smash kelly.
If it helps i will add a disclaimer - "The stats i displayed reflect games played not NCAA records" happy?
So I'd say it's very pertinent to include those in the comparison.
Golson was one of those ineligible players....you think we were going 12-0 with Tommy Rees at QB and minus one our best DBs and one of our best WRs. Without those guys that season wouldn't have happened, and outside of some misty eyes ND Homers [which I include myself in] it never did happen.
whatever you gotta do to make your point against kelly, go ahead...
You think I like that we are no longer the #1 winningest program in history? Or that we didn't just fall from 1st, but to 3rd or 4th?? I don't, I wish it didn't happen, but it did, it's a fact, it's in the history books now, it happened on Kelly's watch and it is now a permanent part of his and our resume.
We'll be working to regain that position for YEARS after Kelly is long and gone, so no, I don't give him a pass to try and make his resume look better. It is what it is and his is 55-33. period.
o my god! you are making this way to complicated. no one is denying the vacated wins and how much it sucks for the university. Can you PLEASE just let that go for a second and reread my added disclaimer, that should be the end of the discussion. All i did was count the games played, that its, END OF DISCUSSION. you can go on and not count all the vacated victories you want, thats fine, it doesn't matter! It was just some comparisons, get off it already. you hate kelly, fine. But looking at actually games played, counted or not, his resume is better than petterson, thats the end of it. You can still hate kelly and love petterson or whatever, it doesn't matter. Its just stupid stats. get that through your head.
2016 was a fireable offense, full stop. But, Swarbrick had to weigh whether a new coach was a better option than Kelly going forward. He made the right choice, and it was incredibly risky, so good for him.
For the record I also thought and wrote he should have been fired.
Let's see if you still think he was right when we've been sitting on Kelly for 15 years with no NC to show for it.
We will effectively have turned ourselves from the most dominant NC winning program in history, into VaTech.
There were a number of factors in play.
Also, this season is still a work in progress. November in both 2015 & 2017 was Kelly's undoing in terms of the playoffs. We need to see different results before anointing Kelly 2.0.
I am certainly hopeful that we can...but it very much remains to be seen at this point.
If they had a really good option post 2016 he might have pulled the trigger on Kelly.
Anything short of a championship or playoff appearance might be seen as failure by some, which is fair I suppose, but 17-3 since the debacle is indicative of a good bet by Swarbrick. The program is in a healthy place.
We won a New Year's Day Bowl against an SEC Team.
It was an awesome year if you blot out a few memories. Kind of like having an awesome marriage.
No it would be more like thinking you had an awesome marriage because you blotted out some memories (like her banging half the neighborhood for years), then it ended in a messy divorce, but you met another chick right away, but she was not nearly as hot as your ex-wife, but she let you bang her on the first night and she swallows..
.......but you knocked her up on the first night and the DNA results ARE IN!!
Yep, that about captures the 2017 season for me.
(no message)
with herpies and a really sore ass.
(no message)
This board made me the way I am..
...I know, even worse, RIGHT?!?
I mean if you go look at college stats pretty much everywhere, his record has been adjusted to remove those wins from his all time record (and ours).
I still remember the excitement of 2012, I loved it, it was a great time to be alive, The World was a better place...but are we really supposed to just ignore the "fact" that all 12 of those Ws have been wiped from the record books forever?
Sorry, I can't do that... much easier for me to ignore that pollsters picked the wrong team in '93 than to ignore this.
(no message)
He is obviously a good coach, but when the game plan goes wrong, I don't know if it's stubbornness or being too conservative or what, but he gets that "deer in the headlights" look and keeps trying to force the issue without success and make any adjustments. I just saw it again in the PITT game, stacked the box stunned the running game and pressured Book all day. He never adjusted to the defensive scheme. Thanks to solid defense and a great play made by Book and Boykin or it might have been a loss.
in that situation.
What is it...Forgive lest you be Forgiven? hmmmm..
...was really a matter of Ian Book not being able to hit his down field passes enough to prevent the defense from stacking up the safeties to blitz the QB and stop the run.
Book did finally make the throw, and look what happened. we will see that over and over until Book shows that he can make that throw, and even then, we will likely see it because teams figure that approach offers the best chance for success against us.
Play the run and the underneath passes. Zone blitz a lot because the QB does not have the accuracy to burn you long.
And frankly. Except for the KO return, we beat them well enough in the second half.
I think you are recalling the "Rees" defense incorrectly my friend....the typical Rees defense was 3 man front with 8 in pass coverage. Our run game was pathetic at that time, we couldn't even run against 3 man fronts and while Rees was not a deep threat, his accuracy and time on short and intermediate stuff was pin point and he would pick teams apart that only had 4 or 5 in coverage. He struggled heavily (as most would) vs 8 in coverage and no run game to turn to.
We outrushed our opponents by 300 yards, despite a paltry 8-5 showing. We had a 1000 yard rusher, and another with over 800 yards. I wouldn't call that pathetic.
I can't speak to whether there were three-man fronts, but it is possible to load the box using a three man-front. I remember all year thinking that that it was awfully hard to run when the safeties did not have respect the long ball, and could cheat up. It made blitzing easy, since you just had to cover the quick throws underneath.
It may be that we are seeing the same thing two different ways. You could probably get away with dropping eight in coverage if you are close enough to the box when you start. With normal QBs, the safeties must play back. That's like taking two away from the defense.
Teams stopped us in 2013 the same way, where they would simply drop 8 in a short zone coverage.
With no arm strength from Tommy Rees, and no running threat from the quarterback, it made things much simpler for opposing defenses. The only things that kept us from having a disastrous year were that Rees was easily one of the best at making pass protection audibles, that the running backs were pretty good at pass blocking / route running, and that this would buy Rees enough time for a receiver to finally get open.
We were quite capable of running in 2013 (Atkinson was averaging 6 yards a carry, McDaniel at 4.6, Folston at 5.3, and Carlisle at 4.3). We simply chose not to do so, which made it even easier for the defenses.
That being said, I do credit Brian Kelly for being able to squeeze out every last drop of performance from Tommy Rees that year. That 9 win season was about as good as we could have hoped to have, and was probably the one of the best examples of his ability to coach a team (2012, 2015, and arguably, 2017 were the only other good or excellent seasons).
Off top of my head, Wood was our only productive RB that season and he started out hot but faded as the season went on.
I just recall teams that tried to play zone or man to man, and crowd box against the run, Rees would pick them apart with short intermediate stuff and we'd move up and down the field, but once teams wised up and started lining up 7-8 guys deep, he struggled throwing against it and we either couldn't or wouldn't run the ball.
(no message)
he couldn't stop doing stupid stuff....On the field!
What I saw was a direct flashback to most of the flawed non-adjustment made, failures in Kelly's past.
He 'knew it all' before the game started and stuck with it as long as he could, even though it wasn't working and we were on the brink of defeat at the hands of a far inferior team. Only at the end, when he started mixing things up again did our offense finally get going and took the lead.
He already 'knows it all' of what we need to do against Navy, but unless they just play terrible it isn't going to work well and Navy will stay in the game, won't matter because he knows best and he'll stick to his guns until late in the game, then switch to what we really should have been doing the whole game to pull out a closer than it should have been win.
The way Kelly coaches keeps lesser teams in games, giving them chances at stealing Ws that never should have been there... we've seen it time and time again for 9 years now, he's not going to change.
(no message)
(no message)
If Book more consistently hits the deep ball, like the beautiful throw to Boykin against Pitt, ND is a credible playoff team. If that part of the game doesn't come around, opposing defenses have the template to stymie ND's offense. The OL will look much better if safeties have to take a few steps back. I like Book's chances. More repetition, better execution. I would like to see more from WRs other than Claypool, Boykin, and Finke too.
Delayed draw plays against the rush either by the RB's or Book himself
Quick slants to flankers, Tate killed teams with five yard catches and YAC
Quick hits to the TE
Screen passes
Try something, just don't depend on Book hitting deep passes down field to win
Exactly....and no passes across the field...stop running wide...TE over the middle....
Busting slants, turning "quick hitters" into YAC, draws and screens work much better when the safeties are deep. It's a numbers game.
It's a tit for tat thing, they all help each other...if you have a strong consistent run game it makes it easier to pass, if you have the legitimate threat of the deep pass is makes it easier to establish a strong consistent run game.
But, if you are not a team who can run the ball effectively enough when they drop back to take away the deep pass (or throw the deep pass effectively enough when they stack the box to take away the run game) to actually make the defense change what they are doing, then those are the wrong ways to attack it.
Back when Rees was here, he took a lot of flack for being a terrible passer, while it is true he had a weak arm he was actually a very good passer, with great touch and accuracy. Defenses knew this and knew he had the ability to pick them apart if left unchecked, so the common theme when playing us was to drop 8 in to coverage all game long. Now if we had an effective run game that could consistently march the ball against a 3 man front, we could have forced the defense out of this and then Rees' passing would have been effective and the offense would have looked great. But our run game was so pathetic then we couldn't even run effectively vs a 3 man front, so the result was defenses stayed in 8 man coverage and since we couldn't run, Rees had to throw against 8 deep all game long which made him look like shit (as it would to almost any QB).
Now bringing it back to current, our current situation is kind of the opposite and while there are some similarities, the approach isn't identical. Here's what I mean, if the defense stacks the box to take away your run, that means your run game is what they see as your easiest path to beating them. No matter what strategy you use, your ultimate goal HAS to be to circle back to the thing they want to take away. If when they stack the line, you can throw it deep effectively (meaning actually connect with the deep pass at a very high completion rate) then that is GREAT, as long as the second they adjust to you hurting them deep you go right back to the run game to hurt them there...if you do, you get them off balance, they're on their heels and you now have the advantage....but if you don't, if you keep throwing after they've adjusted (which is what we normally do) you're gonna start having incompletions and punts or Ints...now the D won that round and you are back to square one.
Here's another part of our problem...when the D stacks the box to take away the run and you abandon the run game altogether in favor of trying to hit the deep ball every play, and you aren't connecting....now you are on a VERY slippery slope of actually allowing the defense to gain the advantage, because if you aren't connecting at a high rate and you aren't running it, now you are one dimensional and all those guys who were up there to take away the run, now they have their ears pinned back on every other play and the plays in between are lined up like they're rushing but really bailing into coverage. This is the worst nightmare for ant QB....he knows every play he's throwing against vs one of two scenarios 1) under duress because they bring more than you can block, or 2) into 7 or 8 man coverage and you don't know where defenders are because they are dropping to coverage from unorthodox places on the field.
The solution to both of these (Rees example and our current struggles) is really quite simple if your team is good enough to perform it and your coach is collective enough to follow the plan in entirety to full fruition (getting back to doing what they were trying to take away) instead of being glamoured by a little temporary success and jumping off the tracks. Because then the plan typically backfires and you think 'oh that plan was bad' but the truth is you screwed the plan by going away from it.
So the plan for both those situations is identical, but opposite. With the Rees one, you attempt to run the ball as long as it's effective enough to keep gaining first downs against the 3 man front, while sprinkling an occasional pass in there just for show. After you've picked up some first downs they will eventually adjust (but they'll try to mask it, with some line up 8 deep looks with predesignated run blitz) as soon as they do you hit them with the pass. Now, you don't have many chances at relying on the run vs the 3 man front...if you try it a few times and you can't get positive enough yardage to consistently be in 3rd and 3 type situations, you gotta go plan B. Plan B is using all the short, quick hitter, draws, delays, screens, slants that PB was talking about [Spoiler Alert] Plan B here is the same as Plan B in our current situation. You use all the things PB talked about to pick them apart little by little, then when they adjust to that (come out of 8 deep) you go right back where you wanted to be with Rees picking them apart with accurate mid range passes.
So now for us in our current team situation it's the opposite, they have line stacked to prevent the run, so you attempt to throw the deep ball as long as it's effective enough to keep you out of 3rd and 10 (or longer) situations, while sprinkling an occasional true run play in there just for show. After you've hurt them by connecting at a high rate with some deep passes, they will have to adjust (but again they'll try to mask it, with some line up 8 in the box looks with predetermined all out bail out into coverage) as soon as they do you slash them with the run. Now, you don't have many chances at relying on the deep ball against the 7 or 8 man front, if you aren't connecting...if you try it a few times and end up in 2 or 3 3rd and 10 situations or it leads to consecutive 3 &Outs, you gotta go plan B. ***Plan B was already outlined above*** You use all the things PB talked about to pick them apart little by little, then when they adjust to that (come out of 8 man fronts and all out pass blitz) you go right back where you wanted to be in the first place with Dex and Jafaar slashing them to the body and Book killing them with play action passes run off successful chunk runs.
Kelly is GREAT at so many things outside of game days...he could literally run circles around me (and probably anyone on here) in about 95% of what he does. He problem is he gets one tracked or off tracked so many times in game situations. He either just keeps throwing deep even if it's not being successful (while forgetting to sprinkle the run in) or once he gets the D on their heels with the pass and they adjust, he's so BIG eyed at the passing success that he forgets all about bringing it around full circle and going back to the run....that is typically right when you see these electric looking drives where we look unstoppable and can just mail up our final score, fizzle and turn into 3 straight incompletions and a punt or FG attempt, or an interception.
This same trait (flaw) has been visible in him every year he's been here (and that's coming from the biggest Kelly fan boy there was, when he was hired) which I why I think he will never change and every year we keep him here will just be another wasted season. Let's say we make the playoff this year, and represent well but go down in defeat, then a near playoff miss followed by a couple obligatory mediocre Kelly years....when this guy is approaching 15 years on the job with zero NCs, are you really going to feel that those 15 years weren't wasted?
Anyway, I digress...the point is what PB was saying about mixing it up is spot on, what you were saying about the deep ball opening that up, while not specifically wrong, is only accurate IF you are actually hitting those deep balls at a high rate (while not forgetting to sprinkle some runs in and then going to the run game altogether as the defense adjusts to respond to being hurt deep