Brian Kelly Likes Notre Dame Morale As The Irish Restart
If the Notre Dame football team was jubilant to return to football activities over the summer after a months-long separation because of COVID-19, the Irish have to be excited about getting back after a week-plus long pause due to an outbreak within the program following their second game of the season.
But while the season was still very much up in the air when they returned in the summer, with the season now underway, the Top 5 Irish have a very real understanding of what’s at stake.
“The attitude has been awesome,” head coach Brian Kelly said earlier in the week. “Our kids have been great. They were hit with something they didn’t expect and again, we had gone for such a long period of time without any setbacks. They’ve handled this adversity quite well.”
Kelly said the morale within the team has been high as they worked through conditioning drills in preparation to return to the practice field later in the week.
“They want to get back at it,” Kelly said. “The energy is high. The morale is excellent. Guys know that there can’t be any margin for error and they’ll follow that up.”
Kelly called playing two games and then taking more than a week off “uncharted territory.”
“It’s different than preparing and being in camp and just hitting each other and then going to play the game,” said Kelly. “That’s the game speed. The speed is different and you’ve got to kind of work through that.
“These guys have played the game. They know what the speed is. They know what they need to be ready for, tackling and things of that nature.”
Notre Dame will conduct a live scrimmage on Sunday in an attempt to get the team reacclimated.
“We’re going to have go against each other and we’re going to have to go live,” said Kelly. “There’s going to have to be a little bit of bowl game preparation if you will. But two weeks is not two months and it’s not like we haven’t been doing it for two months.
“There will be some challenges, but I think once the game gets going, this group has played a lot of football. I’m pretty confident we’ll be able to get up to snuff pretty quickly.