Nearly 12 years have passed since Brian Kelly left UC to become the head coach at Notre Dame.
Last week, Kelly became the career leader in wins among Notre Dame head coaches when the Fighting Irish beat Wisconsin, surpassing the legendary Knute Rockne. On Saturday, Kelly will coach the Irish against his old school when 9th-ranked Notre Dame hosts 7th-ranked UC at Notre Dame Stadium.
This is the story of how Kelly left UC, from my 2019 book on UC’s 2009 season, ‘This is What the Top Feels Like.’
By Bill Koch
Brian Kelly told the UC players during a meeting on Monday December 7, the day after the Bearcats agreed to play in the Sugar Bowl, that he would talk to Notre Dame about its vacant head coaching job. He promised them they would be the first to hear about his decision and instructed them to not listen to what the media was saying or writing. He confirmed on his Twitter account that he was to meet with Notre Dame officials on Tuesday, December 8 in New York, where he would be for the National Football Foundation dinner, but that meeting didn’t take place until the following day.
Meanwhile, Kelly was also in discussions with Mike Thomas, the UC athletic director, about a contract extension that would keep him at UC.
"Cincinnati was ready to put together an awesome contract,” Kelly said. “I would have been happy (to stay) because I didn’t know what it looked like on the other side anyway. I hadn’t swam in those waters. They were on it. They were doing their due diligence and were proactive. They were really good.”
Thomas had been involved for some time in raising funds to cover the cost of Kelly’s latest contract. He estimated the school had raised from $5 million to $6 million to cover the cost of Kelly’s contract and the contracts of his assistant coaches after he was courted by Tennessee, Washington, and several other schools. But when he saw that Notre Dame was calling, he knew he would have a difficult time keeping Kelly.
“When I got the call from (Notre Dame athetic director) Jack Swarbrick that they were interested in talking to Brian I knew that because it was Notre Dame it was going to take more of an effort,” Thomas said. “There were some things we could have continued to do facility-wise to support his program and his staff, but I think at the end of the day, especially when you’re dealing with Notre Dame, it would have been a real challenge. Let’s face it. He had other BCS schools coming after him. When you have successful coaches those are the things you have to deal with.”
Thomas was unable to say how close Cincinnati came to matching Notre Dame’s offer from a financial standpoint because he didn’t know what he was bidding against. Kelly was in a position to know what each school was offering, but said money wasn’t the main issue for him.
“I had to decide whether Notre Dame was going to be the fit that I was looking for, because I was comfortable with the financial package that Cincinnati was offering,” Kelly said. “Here’s the bottom line: I was comfortable with what Cincinnati was doing. I felt like they were doing everything to secure my future at Cincinnati, so it wasn’t a financial decision. It was, ‘Do I want to stay at Cincinnati and continue to build this program, or do I want to take a look at this historic program at Notre Dame?’ So money really wasn’t the issue. It’s just that I knew that Cincinnati had really stepped up.”
Kelly chose to leave Cincinnati for Notre Dame. But while all this was going on, the Cincinnati players were left to wonder what was happening. For the seniors, it was a matter of whether Kelly would be coaching them in the Sugar Bowl. The underclassmen wanted to know who their head coach would be next year.
The answers came on Thursday, December 10, the day of the Bearcats’ football banquet at the Westin Hotel in downtown Cincinnati, when the news leaked out on national media as the day unfolded that Kelly was leaving for Notre Dame. Defensive back Drew Frey heard the news on the car radio as he drove to the Westin with his parents for what he thought would be a celebration of the regular season that had just ended.
But there was very little celebration at the banquet. It was all about Kelly, who arrived at the Westin at about 5:45 and strolled through the lobby flanked by two Cincinnati police officers.
“No word,” he said to reporters who tried to question him about reports that he had accepted the Notre Dame job. “We’re here to celebrate our seniors.”
After the banquet, Kelly met privately with the players and told them he was leaving, even though they had already heard the news.
“We were probably in there one or two minutes max,” said quarterback Tony Pike. “He said, ‘I appreciate what you guys have done. I appreciate how you helped me get to where I’m going.’ Other than that, there were no individual goodbyes. That was it and he was gone.” Several players walked out of the room before Kelly was finished talking and found an assemblage of reporters eager to let them vent.
“I didn’t want to hear it,” wide receiver Mardy Gilyard told reporters. “I’m fairly disgusted with the situation – him letting it last this long. Everybody and his mama knew what was going on. I feel like he did our team an injustice. Hopefully he’ll pack his things up and get to South Bend in a hurry.” “We don’t really care what he has to say anymore,” said tight end Ben Guidugli said. “He can go talk to his Notre Dame team. We’re ready to move forward with whoever wants to move forward with us. He’s not on the boat anymore, so we’ve got to continue on.”
“We want to make sure (people) still come out and support us,” said defensive end Alex Daniels, “because we were the ones out there playing every day, every snap. He was just the one calling the plays.”
Not all the players ripped Kelly. Linebacker Andre Revels and defenisive back Brad Jones both said they understood his decision and harbored no ill feelings towards him. But overall a thick cloud of anger and bitterness hung over the entire evening.
Kelly couldn’t help but feel it.
“Mardy wouldn’t even come near me,” Kelly said. “He gave me a look. None of the guys were happy because it broke during the banquet. It was the worst banquet I’ve ever been to. It was pretty close to mutiny during the banquet. It was awful. It was terrible. It was the worst thing that I’ve been a part of, for that to happen. That’s why I’m still upset to this day that it wasn’t handled the right way.”
Kelly insists that he did nothing wrong. He said he handled his exit exactly the way he promised he would. It wasn’t his fault that his decision had hit the news before he had a chance to inform his players in person.
“I did it with integrity and honesty, and it was not handled (properly) by whoever leaked it out to the media,” Kelly said. “I think that was unfair to our players to have that happen to them because I always told them, ‘You’ll be the first to know,’ so they should have been mad, they should have been upset because if I was them, I would be too, because that’s what I told them. I never lied to them and I never told them something that wasn’t true. There was nothing that I could have done differently because I handled it the way it should have been handled.”
One of the reasons some of the Cincinnati players were so angry is that they believed Kelly had lied to them. Both Pike and Gilyard had personally asked Kelly when the Notre Dame rumors were beginning to swirl if they were true.
“I remember going to a practice at Nippert Stadium and asking Brian Kelly, there’s a lot of rumors going on about you and Notre Dame,” Pike said. “I had my arm around him on the sideline and he said, ‘Why would I leave Cincinnati? I can play for a national championship here.’
“The reason we had so much success was that everyone on that team bought in together. If a player said something, we bought in. If a coach said something, we bought in. So if Coach Kelly’s saying he’s going to stay here, then I’m not putting any thought into him not staying here. It turned into there’s all these rumors going on, but people don’t know what they’re talking about. Our coach is our coach and he’s going to be here.”
Gilyard was more upset about how he felt Kelly handled his departure than he was about Kelly’s actual decision to leave for Notre Dame. That part he could understand.
“He handled the whole situation wrong,” Gilyard said. “If I had a chance to talk to him today, I’d tell him. He lied to me. He lied to the whole team. I asked him about it personally and he looked at me and said no. So I went in and told the team. But it all turned out to be true.”
Linebacker Craig Carey understands the anger many of his teammates felt, but he also believes that some of them misunderstood what Kelly was telling them about the Notre Dame rumors.
“He was very good with the way he worded certain things,” Carey said, “so I could definitely understand why players thought he told us that he was going to stay. But I didn’t ever take it that way. I loved him. I think he did wonders for the program while we were there and then he took the job of a lifetime. He didn’t say he wasn’t leaving. He said right now this is what I’m focused on. I’m here. I’m staying here right now.”
There’s a common belief among Cincinnati fans, many of whom still haven’t forgiven Kelly for the way he left, that he was looking to leave Cincinnati from the moment he was hired in December 2006. When the Notre Dame job opened, they believe, it was a lock that Kelly would jump at the chance to leave the Bearcats. After all, wasn’t he looking to leave anyway?
Kelly was definitely ambitious. But it’s also true that while he was at Cincinnati he worked tirelessly to promote the program. And he insisted on a new practice facility to enable the Bearcats to work out indoors during inclement weather in late fall. Would a coach who was looking to leave from the moment he arrived had bothered to do either?
“There was no intention of me taking another job,” Kelly said. “I didn’t come into the season and go through the season with an eye toward, ‘Hey, we’re winning games, I’m going to get out of here.’ My wife was going through cancer. She loves where she lives. We’ve already been through this at Central Michigan. You want to talk about ultimate pressure on a coach? It’s when your wife comes home and says you’d better win because I need to get out of here. That’s pressure on a coach. When she comes home and she loves where she is and she loves the people around her, you’re not going, ‘Where’s the next job?’ So yeah, I may have said I’m not going anywhere.”
Kelly says he never considered Notre Dame to be his dream job, but merely the next step in his career, a chance to coach at the most historic program in college football. What coach wouldn’t consider leaving his current job for that opportunity?
“There’s nothing like it from that perspective,” he said. “It had to be Cincinnati to Notre Dame. Cincinnati to anything else, other than the elite of college football, wouldn’t have been enough. We were in (the equivalent of) a power five conference. If it is what it is today (the Bearcats are a member of the American Athletic Conference) and it’s not a power five conference, it’s a different conversation. But we’re sitting there and we’re going to BCS bowl games in back-to-back years. I’m going to get paid pretty good pay. I love the city. My wife loves the city. It’s a good gig, you know? We’re getting our (practice) facility built. We’ve got a good thing going.
“We were building this thing to sustain it for a long period of time. It wasn’t just let’s go. The vision for it was a sustainable football program playing for championships year after year. What happened after that was the most historic football program got in the way of all that, from my perspective, not Cincinnati’s.
“It wasn’t my dream job. I didn’t ever sit down and dream of an ascension to Notre Dame. I started coaching because I love the relationships. It wasn’t, ‘Hey, Notre Dame is where I want to end up.’ What drew me to Notre Dame and why it ultimately became the dream job is because it became one where it brought all of that together. And then add the ability to have a national presence and the kind of players that allow you those great relationships.”
If it weren’t for the one second that was put on the clock in the Texas-Nebraska Big 12 championship game, Kelly said he would have stayed at Cincinnati at least long enough to coach the Bearcats in the national championship game against Alabama.
“You don’t come into this profession to not coach in the national championship game,” he said. “(Notre Dame) wouldn’t have had a choice. They might have moved on, but there’s no way in heck am I giving up an opportunity to play in the national championship game.”
Who knows? Perhaps Notre Dame would have refused to wait for Kelly and moved on to someone else. If so, there’s a chance that Kelly would have stayed at Cincinnati. But it’s hard to imagine that he would still be there 11 years later, after the Big East Conference fell apart and the Bearcats moved to the American Athletic Conference.
Even without the national championship possibility, Kelly said he considered staying to coach the Bearcats against Florida in the Sugar Bowl, but he concluded that it just wouldn’t work.
“It became impossible because of the way it was handled at the end,” Kelly said. “The trust was gone. They would not play for me at that point, which was a shame because the outcome could have been different. But that ship had sailed once that leaked out.”
Brian Kelly told the UC players during a meeting on Monday December 7, the day after the Bearcats agreed to play in the Sugar Bowl, that he would talk to Notre Dame about its vacant head coaching job. He promised them they would be the first to hear about his decision and instructed them to not listen to what the media was saying or writing. He confirmed on his Twitter account that he was to meet with Notre Dame officials on Tuesday, December 8 in New York, where he would be for the National Football Foundation dinner, but that meeting didn’t take place until the following day.
Meanwhile, Kelly was also in discussions with Mike Thomas, the UC athletic director, about a contract extension that would keep him at UC.
"Cincinnati was ready to put together an awesome contract,” Kelly said. “I would have been happy (to stay) because I didn’t know what it looked like on the other side anyway. I hadn’t swam in those waters. They were on it. They were doing their due diligence and were proactive. They were really good.”
Thomas had been involved for some time in raising funds to cover the cost of Kelly’s latest contract. He estimated the school had raised from $5 million to $6 million to cover the cost of Kelly’s contract and the contracts of his assistant coaches after he was courted by Tennessee, Washington, and several other schools. But when he saw that Notre Dame was calling, he knew he would have a difficult time keeping Kelly.
“When I got the call from (Notre Dame athetic director) Jack Swarbrick that they were interested in talking to Brian I knew that because it was Notre Dame it was going to take more of an effort,” Thomas said. “There were some things we could have continued to do facility-wise to support his program and his staff, but I think at the end of the day, especially when you’re dealing with Notre Dame, it would have been a real challenge. Let’s face it. He had other BCS schools coming after him. When you have successful coaches those are the things you have to deal with.”
Thomas was unable to say how close Cincinnati came to matching Notre Dame’s offer from a financial standpoint because he didn’t know what he was bidding against. Kelly was in a position to know what each school was offering, but said money wasn’t the main issue for him.
“I had to decide whether Notre Dame was going to be the fit that I was looking for, because I was comfortable with the financial package that Cincinnati was offering,” Kelly said. “Here’s the bottom line: I was comfortable with what Cincinnati was doing. I felt like they were doing everything to secure my future at Cincinnati, so it wasn’t a financial decision. It was, ‘Do I want to stay at Cincinnati and continue to build this program, or do I want to take a look at this historic program at Notre Dame?’ So money really wasn’t the issue. It’s just that I knew that Cincinnati had really stepped up.”
Kelly chose to leave Cincinnati for Notre Dame. But while all this was going on, the Cincinnati players were left to wonder what was happening. For the seniors, it was a matter of whether Kelly would be coaching them in the Sugar Bowl. The underclassmen wanted to know who their head coach would be next year.
The answers came on Thursday, December 10, the day of the Bearcats’ football banquet at the Westin Hotel in downtown Cincinnati, when the news leaked out on national media as the day unfolded that Kelly was leaving for Notre Dame. Defensive back Drew Frey heard the news on the car radio as he drove to the Westin with his parents for what he thought would be a celebration of the regular season that had just ended.
But there was very little celebration at the banquet. It was all about Kelly, who arrived at the Westin at about 5:45 and strolled through the lobby flanked by two Cincinnati police officers.
“No word,” he said to reporters who tried to question him about reports that he had accepted the Notre Dame job. “We’re here to celebrate our seniors.”
After the banquet, Kelly met privately with the players and told them he was leaving, even though they had already heard the news.
“We were probably in there one or two minutes max,” said quarterback Tony Pike. “He said, ‘I appreciate what you guys have done. I appreciate how you helped me get to where I’m going.’ Other than that, there were no individual goodbyes. That was it and he was gone.” Several players walked out of the room before Kelly was finished talking and found an assemblage of reporters eager to let them vent.
“I didn’t want to hear it,” wide receiver Mardy Gilyard told reporters. “I’m fairly disgusted with the situation – him letting it last this long. Everybody and his mama knew what was going on. I feel like he did our team an injustice. Hopefully he’ll pack his things up and get to South Bend in a hurry.” “We don’t really care what he has to say anymore,” said tight end Ben Guidugli said. “He can go talk to his Notre Dame team. We’re ready to move forward with whoever wants to move forward with us. He’s not on the boat anymore, so we’ve got to continue on.”
“We want to make sure (people) still come out and support us,” said defensive end Alex Daniels, “because we were the ones out there playing every day, every snap. He was just the one calling the plays.”
Not all the players ripped Kelly. Linebacker Andre Revels and defenisive back Brad Jones both said they understood his decision and harbored no ill feelings towards him. But overall a thick cloud of anger and bitterness hung over the entire evening.
Kelly couldn’t help but feel it.
“Mardy wouldn’t even come near me,” Kelly said. “He gave me a look. None of the guys were happy because it broke during the banquet. It was the worst banquet I’ve ever been to. It was pretty close to mutiny during the banquet. It was awful. It was terrible. It was the worst thing that I’ve been a part of, for that to happen. That’s why I’m still upset to this day that it wasn’t handled the right way.”
Kelly insists that he did nothing wrong. He said he handled his exit exactly the way he promised he would. It wasn’t his fault that his decision had hit the news before he had a chance to inform his players in person.
“I did it with integrity and honesty, and it was not handled (properly) by whoever leaked it out to the media,” Kelly said. “I think that was unfair to our players to have that happen to them because I always told them, ‘You’ll be the first to know,’ so they should have been mad, they should have been upset because if I was them, I would be too, because that’s what I told them. I never lied to them and I never told them something that wasn’t true. There was nothing that I could have done differently because I handled it the way it should have been handled.”
One of the reasons some of the Cincinnati players were so angry is that they believed Kelly had lied to them. Both Pike and Gilyard had personally asked Kelly when the Notre Dame rumors were beginning to swirl if they were true.
“I remember going to a practice at Nippert Stadium and asking Brian Kelly, there’s a lot of rumors going on about you and Notre Dame,” Pike said. “I had my arm around him on the sideline and he said, ‘Why would I leave Cincinnati? I can play for a national championship here.’
“The reason we had so much success was that everyone on that team bought in together. If a player said something, we bought in. If a coach said something, we bought in. So if Coach Kelly’s saying he’s going to stay here, then I’m not putting any thought into him not staying here. It turned into there’s all these rumors going on, but people don’t know what they’re talking about. Our coach is our coach and he’s going to be here.”
Gilyard was more upset about how he felt Kelly handled his departure than he was about Kelly’s actual decision to leave for Notre Dame. That part he could understand.
“He handled the whole situation wrong,” Gilyard said. “If I had a chance to talk to him today, I’d tell him. He lied to me. He lied to the whole team. I asked him about it personally and he looked at me and said no. So I went in and told the team. But it all turned out to be true.”
Linebacker Craig Carey understands the anger many of his teammates felt, but he also believes that some of them misunderstood what Kelly was telling them about the Notre Dame rumors.
“He was very good with the way he worded certain things,” Carey said, “so I could definitely understand why players thought he told us that he was going to stay. But I didn’t ever take it that way. I loved him. I think he did wonders for the program while we were there and then he took the job of a lifetime. He didn’t say he wasn’t leaving. He said right now this is what I’m focused on. I’m here. I’m staying here right now.”
There’s a common belief among Cincinnati fans, many of whom still haven’t forgiven Kelly for the way he left, that he was looking to leave Cincinnati from the moment he was hired in December 2006. When the Notre Dame job opened, they believe, it was a lock that Kelly would jump at the chance to leave the Bearcats. After all, wasn’t he looking to leave anyway?
Kelly was definitely ambitious. But it’s also true that while he was at Cincinnati he worked tirelessly to promote the program. And he insisted on a new practice facility to enable the Bearcats to work out indoors during inclement weather in late fall. Would a coach who was looking to leave from the moment he arrived had bothered to do either?
“There was no intention of me taking another job,” Kelly said. “I didn’t come into the season and go through the season with an eye toward, ‘Hey, we’re winning games, I’m going to get out of here.’ My wife was going through cancer. She loves where she lives. We’ve already been through this at Central Michigan. You want to talk about ultimate pressure on a coach? It’s when your wife comes home and says you’d better win because I need to get out of here. That’s pressure on a coach. When she comes home and she loves where she is and she loves the people around her, you’re not going, ‘Where’s the next job?’ So yeah, I may have said I’m not going anywhere.”
Kelly says he never considered Notre Dame to be his dream job, but merely the next step in his career, a chance to coach at the most historic program in college football. What coach wouldn’t consider leaving his current job for that opportunity?
“There’s nothing like it from that perspective,” he said. “It had to be Cincinnati to Notre Dame. Cincinnati to anything else, other than the elite of college football, wouldn’t have been enough. We were in (the equivalent of) a power five conference. If it is what it is today (the Bearcats are a member of the American Athletic Conference) and it’s not a power five conference, it’s a different conversation. But we’re sitting there and we’re going to BCS bowl games in back-to-back years. I’m going to get paid pretty good pay. I love the city. My wife loves the city. It’s a good gig, you know? We’re getting our (practice) facility built. We’ve got a good thing going.
“We were building this thing to sustain it for a long period of time. It wasn’t just let’s go. The vision for it was a sustainable football program playing for championships year after year. What happened after that was the most historic football program got in the way of all that, from my perspective, not Cincinnati’s.
“It wasn’t my dream job. I didn’t ever sit down and dream of an ascension to Notre Dame. I started coaching because I love the relationships. It wasn’t, ‘Hey, Notre Dame is where I want to end up.’ What drew me to Notre Dame and why it ultimately became the dream job is because it became one where it brought all of that together. And then add the ability to have a national presence and the kind of players that allow you those great relationships.”
If it weren’t for the one second that was put on the clock in the Texas-Nebraska Big 12 championship game, Kelly said he would have stayed at Cincinnati at least long enough to coach the Bearcats in the national championship game against Alabama.
“You don’t come into this profession to not coach in the national championship game,” he said. “(Notre Dame) wouldn’t have had a choice. They might have moved on, but there’s no way in heck am I giving up an opportunity to play in the national championship game.”
Who knows? Perhaps Notre Dame would have refused to wait for Kelly and moved on to someone else. If so, there’s a chance that Kelly would have stayed at Cincinnati. But it’s hard to imagine that he would still be there 11 years later, after the Big East Conference fell apart and the Bearcats moved to the American Athletic Conference.
Even without the national championship possibility, Kelly said he considered staying to coach the Bearcats against Florida in the Sugar Bowl, but he concluded that it just wouldn’t work.
“It became impossible because of the way it was handled at the end,” Kelly said. “The trust was gone. They would not play for me at that point, which was a shame because the outcome could have been different. But that ship had sailed once that leaked out.”
Comments
Post a Comment