Irish hoops coach cheers Kelly’s success
It’s been a while now, but a Notre Dame coach remembers what it was like arriving with great fanfare and becoming the toast of the town after early success. Then things leveled off, he hit a rut in Years 5 and 6 and found himself squarely on the hot seat.
Though the sport wasn’t football, basketball coach Mike Brey could identify with what Brian Kelly went through this past offseason. In many ways, their careers at Notre Dame had followed a similar arc: Brey went to the Sweet 16 in his third season (something that hadn’t happened there in 16 years), while Kelly’s third season resulted in a trip to the BCS title game and Notre Dame’s best finish in nearly two decades.
Brey, like Kelly, subsequently had opportunities to leave but chose to stay in South Bend, only to see the trajectory of his program go in a different direction. And after three consecutive NIT bids, it was very much touch-and-go whether he’d get a chance to stay.
“The natives were very restless,” Brey told USA TODAY Sports. “I always tell coaches, you have to have a couple ‘come off the mat’ years. It’s that (next) year, can you come off the mat?”
Brey came off the mat and has taken Notre Dame to 10 of the last 12 NCAA tournaments, including a couple of Elite Eight appearances. And he’s thrilled that Kelly appears headed for a similar bounce-back year, with the Fighting Irish sitting at 6-1 and very relevant again after last season’s 4-8 debacle.
“I couldn’t be cheering more for a coach when they do that — any coach — because I’ve felt it,”
Brey said. “We’ve all been there. And Brian did a fabulous job of self-reflection and changing his staff, aggressively saying, hey, we’re doing this. And the new staff, the new tone, has obviously worked wonders.”
Brey pointed specifically to the hire of defensive coordinator Mike Elko from Wake Forest and Matt Balis, who helped run the strength and conditioning program for Urban Meyer at Utah and Florida and Dan Mullen at Mississippi State, for “changing our toughness a little bit, our mental toughness.”
The results are starting to speak for themselves. Although Notre Dame still has three major challenges — starting with North Carolina State on Saturday — and no margin for error if it wants to make the College Football Playoff, the Irish physically have dominated in all six of their victories. In their lone loss, they went toe-to-toe with Georgia in a 20-19 game that was decided on a late field goal.
If nothing else, the start has quieted any calls for Notre Dame to change coaches and raised the possibility that Kelly might be
around for the long haul — which can mean something different at Notre Dame, a job that notoriously chews up coaches.
Brey hopes Kelly’s turnaround this season will change the perception that a football coach at Notre Dame can only do the job well for five or six years before getting worn out and needing to move on.
“I know he doesn’t want to coach anywhere else, but it is a hard job,” Brey said. “This is my fifth guy, and I’ve watched it, and it’s really hard and you wonder, like a lot of them after seven to eight years, they say maybe I just go somewhere else.
“But he wants to make it work and get it going again, and boy are we in position this year and there’s a great vibe about this group.”
GROUNDBREAKING HIRE
Virginia’s hire of Carla Williams to be its athletics director could go down as a significant turning point for gender and racial equity in athletics administration. Williams, a former Georgia women’s basketball player who had been the No. 2 administrator
in the department behind athletics director Greg McGarity, becomes the first African- American woman to get an AD job in a Power Five conference.
And she almost certainly won’t be the last.
“Put simply, it’s a defining moment,” said Patti Phillips, CEO of the Women Leaders in College Sports organization. “It is one of those moments that breaks a ceiling many people thought would never be broken. Her hiring is needed momentum for a culture shift, which leads to a shift in people’s perception of what women can do.”
Williams becomes the fifth woman among the Power Five athletics director ranks, joining Debbie Yow at North Carolina State, Sandy Barbour at Penn State and more recent hires in Jennifer Cohen at Washington and Heather Lyke at Pittsburgh.
In the Group of Five, Desiree Reed-Francois was hired at UNLV and Marie Tuite at San Jose State this year. Adding in longtime Charlotte athletics director Judy Rose and Western Michigan’s Kathy Beauregard, that’s 7% of Football Bowl Subdivision athletics departments led by women.
It’s progress but still not enough.
“Representation matters,” Phillips said. “I am so excited that now younger women, student-athletes ( both male and female), other institutions and search firms will see a woman of color succeeding in this elite position. That model is very powerful. The number of women, and especially women of color, leading in intercollegiate athletics is still far too low, but with this hire, we are slowly moving the needle.”
With several FBS athletics director jobs still open, it’s possible the wave of women being hired will continue.
Among the administrators considered by industry leaders to be on the athletics director track are Texas A&M’s Stephanie Rempe, North Carolina’s Nicki Moore, Tulane’s Monica Lebron, Texas’ Amy Folan, Arkansas’ Julie Cromer-Peoples and Vanderbilt’s Candice Storey Lee. There are also current athletics directors at non-football schools including Kim Record at North Carolina- Greensboro and Santa Clara’s Renee Baumgartner who could be candidates to move into bigger jobs.