Irish 'byes

Welp. There goes Brian Kelly's statue.

Or, maybe not, given Notre Dame's irresistible urge to scratch the itch of its own history. Kelly stayed in South Bend for 12 years, long enough for N.D. to confer a certain permanence on the relationship, even if he is running off with some floozy from Baton Rouge. He stayed long enough to knock Rockne off his perch as Notre Dame's winningest coach, and to become the most successful Irish coach since Saint Lou of Holtz, and to get Notre Dame as close to another national title as a man was likely to get it.

Which goes to the relevant point here, as Kelly takes LSU's money and runs: Times have changed.

The landscape is all different now, less forgiving, more nakedly predatory. What passed for civilized behavior in college football, if such a thing existed, is impossibly quaint now, like cold bottles of milk left on your doorstep at dawn. 

Schools that used to honor a kid's commitment now keep recruiting him, if he's desirable enough. Conferences that used to honor one another's borders now routinely stage daylight raids across them, poaching lucrative programs who are all too willing to be poached, conference ties meaning less than nothing now. And it isn't just the starter schools coaches are leaving for the big money.

In the last two days, see, another earthquake again has jumbled the topography. Sportsball World had barely finished processing Lincoln Riley's revolutionary act -- Leaving one historically un-leaveable program for another? Who does that? -- when the news broke that it was happening again. 

Brian Kelly forsaking Notre Dame for LSU? What madness be this?

Rockne and Leahy and Ara and even Saint Lou never did this; in all the spangled history of football at Notre Dame, no coach ever left the Irish until he either lost too many games or got ground to dust by the job. Ditto Bud Wilkinson and Chuck Fairbanks and Barry Switzer at Oklahoma -- one of whom retired to try his hand at politics, the other two to give the NFL a whirl.

No one ever left Notre Dame or Oklahoma for some other school. The very idea was preposterous.

But Riley saw something at USC he couldn't achieve even at Oklahoma, and Kelly perhaps sees the same thing at LSU. Impossible to say, until he tells us, what exactly Kelly's motivation is, outside of the number of zeroes on a paycheck. But perhaps he figured he'd done as much as he was going to do in South Bend, and it was time, at 60, to take one last crack at the only thing he hasn't done.

Which is win a national title.

And which maybe he began to see as far back as 2012 was going to be a bridge too far at Notre Dame.

That's the year the Irish went 12-0 and came to the BCS championship game ranked No. 1, only to get curb-stomped by Alabama 42-14. Subsequent losses in the College Football Playoff -- 30-3 to Clemson in 2019 and 31-14 to Alabama last year -- perhaps signaled that Notre Dame had gained entrance once more to the elite, but not to THE elite.

Perhaps, after 12 years, Kelly realized that was as good as it was going to get. In any event, he's off to LSU, where the competition will be stiffer but the rewards -- LSU has won three national titles since Notre Dame won its last 32 years ago -- conceivably greater.

The SEC, after all, has produced the last two national champions, and four of the last six. 

Notre Dame?

Zero since 1989, when Tone Loc was still a thing.

And when the world was all different, in more ways than one.