Brian Kelly will be on the sideline when the Irish visit Spartan Stadium on Sept. 18th, 2010. (Photo by Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
Even if you’ve been living under the proverbial rock, you’ve no doubt heard that former Cincinnati coach Brian Kelly has left the Bearcats to become the new head coach for the Fighting Irish. The official introduction came on Friday, though reports started to surface Thursday afternoon that Kelly was going to be the guy.
Kelly, who lead the Cincinnati Bearcats to Big East conference championships in 2008 and 2009 and had an undefeated season this year, will take over for a Notre Dame squad that finished just 6-6 this season and has won a mere 57.9% of it’s games since 1997.
Kelly spent a lot of time coaching in the state of Michigan before going to Cincinnati, leading the program at Central Michigan from 2004-2006, winning the MAC championship in his final season with CMU. Before that, Kelly was head coach at Grand Valley State, leading the Lakers to two Division II national championships in 2002 and 2003.
Point is, Kelly’s been successful pretty much everywhere he’s been. He has an overall winning percentage of .748. His regular season record has remained the same or improved for every team he’s been at since 1999. This in contrast to the past Irish coaches Charlie Weis and Bob Davie, who had no head coaching experience before taking over at ND, and Tyrone Willingham who only had 54% win percentage before taking over the Irish.
Kelly and the Fighting Irish will play our Michigan State Spartans on September 18th next season, the Spartans’ third game of the season. There’s not a large body of work in which Kelly has faced the Spartans. He has faced MSU just once, when he was at Central Michigan, a game in which MSU won 24-7 back in 2004. MSU scored first and lead for the entire game, behind solid rushing performances from Jason Teague (74 yards) and Jehuu Caulcrick (67 yards).
In face, Kelly has faced the Big Ten just 5 times. From Rittenberg:
Here are his records against Big Ten teams:
vs. Michigan State: 0-1
vs. Illinois: 1-0
vs. Indiana: 0-2
vs. Penn State: 0-1Kelly faced Rich Rodriguez in 2007 when Rodriguez coached at West Virginia, and the Mountaineers beat Cincinnati 28-23.
MSU has faired pretty well against Notre Dame against the past three major Notre Dame coaches (Weis, Willingham and Davie), going 8-4 and winning every game except for one in South Bend in that time frame. Given ND’s performance against MSu the last 12 years, I can’t imagine Brian Kelly fairing any worse than his predecessors, and considering his proven track record of improvement everywhere he has been, signs seem to point toward tougher sledding against the Irish in the coming years than what we’ve seen before.
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