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It’s official: Marcus Freeman and Notre Dame just won the breakup with Brian Kelly
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Three years ago, Brian Kelly left Notre Dame to chase a national title at LSU. In some ways, perhaps it was fitting that Kelly left an Irish program that still had a shot to make the 4-team Playoff, pending the results of conference championship weekend. After all, this was Notre Dame. As in, the program that had just 2 wins vs. AP Top 5 teams since 1999, only 1 of which came during Kelly’s 12 seasons in South Bend. Surely even if the Irish got back to the Playoff, which they had been to twice under Kelly, the path to a national title was still nearly impossible.
Fast forward to Thursday night. Marcus Freeman and Notre Dame didn’t just beat Penn State in the Orange Bowl in thrilling fashion to earn a national title berth — it won the Kelly breakup for good.
Freeman might not ever take Kelly’s title of “winningest Notre Dame coach in program history,” but by beating Penn State to earn a trip to the national championship, he did the exact thing that was deemed impossible for the Irish in the pre-Freeman era. In the last week alone, Freeman beat more AP Top-5 teams than Kelly did in his entire time in South Bend. Freeman now has a 3-1 advantage in that all-important, program-defining statistic.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, Kelly’s lone win vs. an AP Top 5 team at Notre Dame came against No. 1 Clemson in 2020 … when Trevor Lawrence was out with COVID … and then Clemson won 34-10 in the rematch in the ACC Championship.
Yeah, that’s noteworthy.
But isn’t it also noteworthy that Georgia had a backup QB in the Sugar Bowl? If we’re gonna knock Kelly for the backup QB luck in the 2020 Clemson game, don’t we have to do the same for Notre Dame in the Georgia game? Fine. It was still a 13-point win against the team that won 2 out of the past 3 national titles. That counts.
So does Thursday. Sure, we can point out James Franklin and his — checks notes — 4-20 record vs. AP Top 10 teams at Penn State. We can also acknowledge that rallying back from double digits in a Playoff semifinal game is a challenge against anyone. We can also acknowledge that Freeman’s path to get to a title game already is more impressive than Kelly’s storybook 2012 run to a BCS title berth. That’s why this point holds even if Notre Dame gets blown out by the Cotton Bowl winner. Freeman is 7-0 vs. AP Top 25 teams this year.
The point of Kelly’s stunning move was that Notre Dame wasn’t positioned to win titles in the way that LSU was. After all, Kelly was trying to become the 4th consecutive LSU coach to win a title. He went to a program that had more 21st-century national titles (3) than Notre Dame had wins vs. AP Top 5 teams.
Kelly is still searching for his first Playoff berth at LSU.
When Freeman was promoted to be Kelly’s successor, the video of the team reacting to him arriving in the locker room went viral. It made sense. Freeman clearly had earned the respect of that locker room. Guys wanted to play for him. In the changing world of NIL, clearly, that paid dividends.
He made savvy coordinator hires by getting Al Golden to be his defensive play-caller, and fittingly, Freeman poached Mike Denbrock off Kelly’s LSU staff to get him to return to run his offense at Notre Dame. Freeman executed a selective transfer portal process wherein he said the Irish “wouldn’t Major in it, but they’d Minor in it.” Freeman minored well enough in it to get quarterback Riley Leonard, who admittedly didn’t make all the plays he could’ve, but was still good enough in the second half after he was checked for a concussion late in the second quarter. That portal strategy also led to the addition of South Carolina transfer Mitch Jeter, who booted the game-winning 41-yard field goal.
Maybe that kick didn’t need to go in for Freeman and the Irish to be the winners of the Kelly breakup. Perhaps just beating Georgia and ripping off 12 consecutive wins after the Northern Illinois loss — that included a program record 9 by double digits — was already enough to show that Freeman’s Irish were different than Kelly’s Irish.
That’s not how this works, though. Suppose Penn State’s first-half domination had turned into what the Irish experienced in the Orange Bowl against Alabama in the national championship 12 years earlier. In that case, you know what the Notre Dame takeaway would’ve been.
“They’ll never get over the hump again.”
Never is a long time. It might’ve felt like “never” under Kelly when Notre Dame would inevitably watch its national title hopes end at the hands of a power like Alabama or Clemson. For all we know, the Cotton Bowl winner will cause Irish fans painful flashbacks in the Jan. 20 national championship game.
That shouldn’t take away from what Freeman has done to take Notre Dame to new 21st-century heights. A suffocating defense with perhaps the nation’s best secondary, a mobile veteran quarterback, a dynamic but gritty ground attack, an top-notch pair of coordinators … it’s all there. Freeman made that happen in ways that Kelly couldn’t quite do against elite foes.
Three years ago, one could’ve pushed back on the notion that a 30-something, first-time head coach like Freeman would win a national title at Notre Dame before Kelly would win one at LSU. We’re 60 minutes from that becoming reality.
Who could’ve imagined that? Definitely not Kelly.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
