re: Hope BK is enjoying watching his old team make a deep run on his couch

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You don't think Kelly would have had Notre Dame in the 12 team playoff?

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Then why is he at LSU? If his life goal is to win a championship, clearly ND was his best opportunity.

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Then theyre as dumb as you are. LSU nuked ND back to the stone age, when they had Samardjiza and Quinn in that Sugar Bowl. They wallowed in mediocrity and fired coaches like it was a sport itself.

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Notre Dame has never 'fired coaches like it was a aport itself'. Even in the lean period between Lou Holtz's final season (1996) and Brian Kelly's first (2010), they only had three different coaches. Bob Davie (97-01) and Charlie Weis (05-09) both got five years in the post, and Tyrone Willingham (02-04) is the only Irish coach in the last 60 years who didn't make it to year 5, and that's because of how immeasurably lazy and poor he was as a recruiter (Washington discovered this to their cost when they subsequently appointed him and he led them to a 0-12 season).

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Also, the ND of today isn't the same one Kelly left. His leaving is what finally got their admin to relax admissions for football players, then you add in the transfer portal and NIL, and what you get is a completely different program than the one Kelly left.

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Admissions have not been relaxed significantly. And the transfer portal has made little difference. Almost all ND's transfers are grad transfers who they could have gotten/did get in the previous era. It's still very hard for ND to get underclassmen transfers admitted, which is why they rarely go down that route. (It's no coincidence that Hartman and Leonard were grad transfers).

The only difference with transfers is the volume. It used to be one or two, now it's more in the 7-9 range, but Freeman still wants to focus primarily on HS recruiting and use transfers to top up areas of weakness. You'll never see ND go down the route of bringing in 15-25 transfers in one off-season.

Where the key difference to Kelly's ND era is, is NIL. ND don't get much publicity for how they use NIL but by all accounts they are very competitive in this area. They tend not to get into a lot of bidding wars for transfer players (except at QB, when needed) but pay their existing roster very well to try to atop them transferring.

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Despite all that, he is still a far better coach coach and program builder than anyone ND has had in over a century, as evidenced by the fact that he is their all-time winningest coach,

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He is also their losingest coach in history. He has more wins AND more losses than any ND coach ever. Which the more discerning observers will realise is primarily a product of his length of service.

He's not even near the top five coaches in program history. Knute Rockne (3), Frank Leahy (4), Ara Parseghian (2), Dan Devine (1), Lou Holtz (1) all have national championships and statues outside Notre Dame Stadium. Rockne and Parseghian in particular were better program builders as well FWIW.

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he is still in a much better position to win a national championship here at LSU.

Kelly will win a natty at LSU, Freeman wont win 1 anywhere.

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We shall see. That's what makes the sport such fun.

"Championship program" - I must have been asleep and missed it - when did CBK win a championship at Notre Dame??

For that matter when did he win a big game?

Your post us non-responsive to the (correct) assertion that we ALL wanted Kelly gone. He did feast on a soft schedule, although I'd argue your assertion that other ND coaches had similar schedules - the schedules were made easier for him. He was good enough to not get fired but bad enough such that we knew he'd never win championships. So we are eternally grateful that he's y'all's problem now and, although Freeman hasn't won the big one yet (he HAS won a major bowl game, something Kelly didn't and never was going to), MF has given us hope. Plus he's a great guy and not a pompous a-hole.

Uh, he came here before the 12 team playoff. Also, he thought he had hit a ceiling with Notre Dame. AND, he saw that Les Miles and Ed Orgeron had won a National Championship over here.