Try again or learn to read. “If there is any credibility…” opens my post. I’ve watched enough of Kelly’s press conferences to note a Weisian arrogance, and never once have I heard or heard of him “step up and say ‘That loss is on me and my staff…’ ” – which most of the losses of the last 2 years have been, and which last week’s was completely, a total coaching failure in the year’s biggest game. That’s the basis for my Devine analogy, which is the major point of the post, not the CDG report.

You obviously dont listen to Kelly’s press conferences or actual words much. what you read on ESPN is far blown out of proportion to his actual words. Yes, he called them out for not playing well…. guess what…. they didn’t. Its also the first time he has called out the players. Numerous times in the past he has put the blame on himself in the coaches. the jury is still out on Kelly as far as I’m concerned but get your facts straight before piping off next time….

One of the few good things that Weis did at ND early on was to try to create a sense of solidarity between his teams and the grand tradition of the university. Having Pareseghian and Holtz as honorary coaches in the spring game….bringing NFL alums and legendary players into the locker room…maintaining the walk from Sacred Heart to the stadium. And that was WEIS, whose signature incompetence was noteworthy even at a school with a long history of hiring less that stellar figures like Anderson, Kuharich, and Davie between geniuses like Rock, Leahy, and Ara.

I had thought that BK was to be the answer – he had the right profile of success at every prior level and job. Earlier games this year were troubling – losses to a truly mediocre USF team and an improved but far from top-tier Michigan team, a weak victory over a struggling Pitt club. But after last week…I am off the BK bandwagon. No, I’m not saying he should be dumped or that it’s time to humiliate ourselves again by courting a Meyer who will never come to ND or any school that places such restrictions on his recruiting. No. But I am revising my own hopes dramatically downward. I had thought that we might have bagged a new version of Ara, the best ND coach of my lifetime by a mile. What I think we may have now is – at best – the 2000s version of Dan Devine, a coach whose ego and refusal to a) admit mistakes and b) grow from them cost ND many a game during his tenure.

If Kelly had stepped up after last week and said “That loss is on me and my staff because we did not have the guys ready to play at a level to compete with a team with this much talent and we did not make proper in-game adjustments” then I would hope that he could grow into the job as Holtz did – Holtz, whose teams pretty much improved each of the first six or seven years he was at ND – and whose teams were always ready to compete at game time. But I have yet to see a BK-coached game that was a full four quarter effort – or hear Kelly do anything after a loss other than rationalize the mistakes and by implication blame the players to absolve the coaches.

We saw much the same kind of thing under Weis. We are no closer now to national prominence than we were five or ten years ago.

Sure we’ll pound Navy. But then we’ll lose a nail biter to Boston College. Or vice versa.

And there is only one bottom line-beat the hell out of Navy and win the game convincingly. Go after the others one at a time. This team can give Stanford all they want; if they want…

Maybe I feel this way because I live in the Syracuse area, but in recent memory Navy is a much better team.

In the last loss to SU, the SU QB was the son of a ND basketball great.

Losing always sucks, and ND has done way too much losing in recent times.