"It's God, Country and Notre Dame. That's a pretty high bar"
Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly says he is excited for 2017. This will be Kelly’s 26th opener, and he used a form of excitement nine times in his Tuesday presser. Could Kelly be drinking the Kool-Aid and high on the start of college football? He very well could be, but there are also some legitimate reason why Kelly is fired up for the Temple.
The first reason would be his quarterback. Brandon Wimbush will make his long awaited debut as QB1, and I have zero hesitations to say he hasn’t done everything right to this stage.
Kelly knows the 6-foot-2, 228-pounder is going to make some mistakes and probably some bone-headed mistakes, but he knows Wimbush isn’t going to dwell on them either.
“He's going to be able to handle things quite well,” stated Kelly. “He does a good job of putting something aside and moving on. He doesn't dwell on a mistake and let it affect the next play because he's going to have that happen to him.
“I'd be more concerned if this was a young man that let mistakes in camp eat at him. He's made some mistakes in camp, but he can put them behind him and move to the next play because he's going to have that in the first couple of weeks of. I'm okay with that.”
Everett Golson was unable to move on from bad plays, and it ate him alive at times. DeShone Kizer never found consistency in 2016 and his mistakes were magnified as they came at crucial times. However, Wimbush has traits those two didn’t possess when it comes to his mental makeup, and Kelly knows it.
“I think really where it starts for most quarterbacks that I have coached is their ability to move through a poor play and get to the next play, let it go and move on to the next play, not let it affect the next one,” explained Kelly. “He has the great ability to show, and I know you hear this quite a bit now, it's chronicled everywhere, but he has a passion for the game, and he's got perseverance. I think Angela Duckworth called that in her book 'grit.'
"He's got grit. He's got such a passion for what he does, and because he loves what he does, he doesn't get down. If he makes a mistake, he fights through it, and he gets to the next play. That's a great quality to have in anything that we do in life. I mean, I'd like to be better at it, too. But he does it at the quarterback position, which is a really fine trait to have for a young player.”
Defense has been a back breaker for the Irish program over the last few seasons, and Mike Elko has already made a positive impact on the program in eight months. Elko didn’t bring a transcendent scheme to South Bend, but instead, he brought fundamentals, and you might just see the Notre Dame defense tackle the ball carrier with consistency this fall.
“If you just came to our practice, you would see those three things being drilled ad nauseam,” said Kelly. “You'd look at the defensive practice field, and you'd see guys mirroring the off hand of the quarterback, working on stripping the football, run support lanes, tackling, run fits. All of the things that I just mentioned, you can talk about them, they sound great, they're great sound bites, but you better do something every single day to develop that.
“What Mike does, he drills that every single day and builds that within the practice schedules. I've even had to adjust our practice schedules to make certain that we get that time in the schedule so he can drill that to the point where he feels comfortable that we're getting to that fundamental kind of football.”
Another reason Kelly has excitement for this season is the physical make up of his team. It wasn’t an easy decision for Kelly to part ways with long-time friend Paul Longo, but enter Matt Balis, and the results are evident.
There are a number of players you could talk about improving physically from a year ago. However, Julian Love is the prime example of what you want to see from your strength and conditioning program.
“He has been so productive in the weight room, as well,” Kelly said of Love. “We did some speed squats yesterday, which is a real indicator of where you are in terms of neuro muscular firing. In other words, a lot of you people understand what I'm talking about, but it's the ability to fire quickly. Stick your foot in the ground after 25 practices, you tend to slow down a little bit. He's increased by about 22% in that area.
“Here is somebody that has been getting a lot of work, a lot of reps. His GPS has been at a high rate, in other words, his player load in practice, but yet continues to increase in the weight room.
“So we're hitting a young man who's just physically continuing to develop, and that is also translating into his play. So we're just getting a young man who's physically growing, maturing, and he's already had those character traits to play at such a young age. We're just really blessed that we've got a young man that has it all together right now.”
Does all this mean Notre Dame is going 12-0 and to the college football playoff? No, but it does make for an energized head coach and it's what Notre Dame needs the most.
"It's God, Country, and Notre Dame," said Kelly. "That's a pretty high bar. You should live up to that bar. I didn't live up to that bar, so I think as the head coach at Notre Dame, every year is the same way: you've got to live up to that high bar, and this year is no different.
"We come into this year, our mission is to win the national championship. That's a pretty high bar. So I think you feel that every single year."