Moments after Northern Illinois blocked Mitch Jeter’s 62-yard field goal attempt to secure a shocking upset of No. 5 Notre Dame on Saturday, the figurative scoreboard between college football’s most historic program and its estranged former head coach remained indecipherable.
Guest column by Steven Godfrey
When he was introduced in Baton Rouge that December, the first Notre Dame coach to leave for another coaching job in 114 years told reporters: “I came down here because I wanted to be with the best. The standard of expectation. You’re looked at in terms of championships here, and I want that. I want to be under the bright lights. That’s part of the draw.”
It’s rare when both the actions and words of a coaching cycle speak at an equally blaring volume, but the fates of Kelly and Notre Dame, and consequently Freeman and LSU, are intertwined until a consensus winner can be determined. Even if you absolutely loathe Notre Dame, it’s hard not to flinch at the gall of a former leader denigrating it as a lesser-than.
Freeman’s Irish dissolved against Northern Illinois on Saturday for his second upset defeat at home against a Group of Five program. The first, a 26-21 loss to Marshall, came in Freeman’s 2022 debut season, making it infinitely easier to dismiss than Saturday’s fiasco. It’s Year 3 for an Irish squad that bullied Texas A&M in the trenches on the road to open the season two weeks ago, a fact worth repeating now if only for its retrospective unbelievability.
Meanwhile, Kelly hasn’t won a season opener since arriving in Louisiana. LSU fell to Southern California on Sept. 1, following previous Week 1 losses against Florida State in 2022 and 2023. But, hey, new coaches love to create new traditions. Despite turning slow starts into something of a signature, Kelly already boasts an SEC West Division title, a Heisman Trophy winner in Jayden Daniels and a win over Nick Saban’s Alabama.
That last feat carries the most emotional weight for both Kelly, whose Notre Dame team was twice crushed by Saban’s Crimson Tide in the postseason, and LSU, whose fans will forever mourn not so much Saban’s decision to leave the Tigers in 2005 for the NFL as his choice to return to college two years later to begin the sport’s greatest dynasty run at a hated rival.
The Saban-shaped hole in LSU’s psyche is a big reason Kelly resides in Baton Rouge. The mandate on Kelly here is very simple after a bizarre few decades: You will win at least one national championship for us, because every coach here does.
“Every coach does” is a modern reimagining of the functional, powerful brand Saban built in the early 2000s following decades of feckless corruption and mismanagement at LSU. But after his departure, replacement Les Miles won the title in 2007, and his successor, native Cajun Ed Orgeron, repeated the feat in a 2019 campaign considered one of the greatest seasons in the history of the sport.
And yet LSU’s emotional collective felt unsatisfied, in massive part because of the professional consistency of the Death Star its spurned leader built in Tuscaloosa. Unlike the idiosyncratic Miles or brusque Orgeron, Kelly comes closest to the politician’s sheen that Saban carried, although without any rings on his hand.
LSU Athletic Director Scott Woodward knew when he fired Orgeron just two years after a perfect national championship run that acing the country club banquet circuit was just as important as recruiting blue-chip linemen, if only because that’s what Saban did. LSU boosters didn’t just want to win; they wanted a statesman doing it.
That Kelly ended up as that Deep South demagogue is more than humorous to die-hard Irish fans who had grown exhausted by their former coach’s cantankerousness with Notre Dame’s form and function. As Kelly stacked double-digit-win seasons following a calamitous 4-8 campaign in 2016, his inability to secure a national championship-caliber roster became a debate in which Kelly himself grew more vocal with his position — that the standards and practices of Notre Dame were holding him back, specifically in securing talent.
It’s no coincidence, then, that Freeman is a renowned recruiter. The 38-year-old former Ohio State linebacker’s task, while unspoken, is clear: Prove to the world (and Notre Dame true believers) that the Irish are still capable of assembling a championship roster within their bespoke standards and practices. In today’s ever-professionalizing game, such a feat certainly feels like an act of faith. That’s okay for Notre Dame fans — as long as history doesn’t reveal Kelly’s abandonment as divination.
Kelly’s move inarguably set a precedent, but the sentiment underneath it was far from new: In 2004, Utah Coach Urban Meyer chose to take the Florida job over Notre Dame specifically because of the existing talent on the Gators’ roster combined with the recruiting potential in the state and region. Meyer won two national championships in Gainesville; Notre Dame hired Charlie Weis, whom it would eventually pay about $19 million just to fire.
And LSU is far from the first SEC program to poach a successful sitting head coach to advance its position in the game’s most cutthroat conference. But unlike the long and bitter history of SEC teams grabbing head coaches from smaller neighbors, Kelly arrived as an outsider unfamiliar with what a rank-and-file Irish message board poster would label as the morass of gray-area morality necessary to maintain an SEC dynasty as Meyer and Saban did.
For years, Kelly could justify his program’s January ineptitude with the unscrupulous SEC practices his program wouldn’t deign to copy. This playbook worked for Jim Harbaugh and Michigan for years — until Harbaugh’s seat in Ann Arbor warmed up as multiple recruiting and sign-stealing schemes were hatched in advance of Michigan’s first national title in decades. If Kelly really felt like the holy Irish wouldn’t get their hands dirty enough to win hardware, it’s incumbent that he realizes he has landed in the South, where neck deep is the standard — and the start.
Entering this weekend, Freeman is 20-9 in South Bend and Kelly is 21-8 in Baton Rouge. It’s entirely rational to measure the “winner” of the Kelly-Irish divorce on the stat sheet, but until one (or both?) claims a national title, the only way to tell who’s winning is to figure out which fan base’s self-image feels most reassured in any given moment. Two weeks ago, that wasn’t LSU. This week, it sure as hell isn’t Notre Dame.
