If you were watching Notre Dame and South Florida closely in the second half Saturday you saw Brian Kelly deliver a halftime speech where he stated how badly he wanted his team to pitch a shutout.
While speaking, Kelly stated to his team that:
“We’re scoring every time we’ve got the football,” Kelly said with Notre Dame leading 35-0 at halftime. “We’re not letting them score any points. We want a shutout. We’re playing for a shutout. This thing is too damn hard. I’m tired of being the nice guy.”
For anyone that has ever spent any amount of time in an athletic locker room or any time around athletes it was harmless and easy to understand what Kelly was trying to say.
It had nothing to do with South Florida but everything to do with his team finishing the task at hand, not becoming complacent despite Notre Dame being on the right side of a blowout and headed towards 2-0.
It’s like when coaches talk about players having killer instincts. They aren’t asking their players to out on the field and literally kill someone, they’re talking about getting their teams to play at a high level and when you have a chance to mentally break your opponent, you go ahead and do so and essentially end the competition.
Again, the speech was entirely harmless and showed a coach trying to keep his team motivated in the middle of a game that certainly was not.
It was not done out of disrespect for South Florida or anyone else, it was said to his team about their performance.
So why then did Brian Kelly feel the need to apologize for what was said in that video on Monday?
“I didn’t know that was going to go public,” Kelly said Monday during his press availability. “If I knew it was public, I probably would have articulated it a little bit differently.”
So I’m guessing somewhere along the lines Kelly caught some backlash over what was said during the video.
Someone who has probably never been outside their comfort zone saw the speech and was mad that a football coach dare to tell his team not to be Mr. Nice Guy out on the playing field.
Of things I’ve heard in locker rooms from the high school ranks all the way through the pros this grades out about as PG as you’re going to find. Sure, it isn’t quite the G rating suitable for all but was still entirely harmless.
Yet Brian Kelly felt the need to apologize for it Monday because I’m guessing someone, somewhere got their feelings hurt over something incredibly minimal.
I was expecting to hear many things from Brian Kelly when he met the media on Monday but an apology for a harmless speech was certainly not one of them.