Brian Kelly being rewarded again is another reminder of what really matters in college football

This is gross, but not new

College football is broken — always has been — but that doesn’t mean there aren’t new lows.

Brian Kelly slithering away from Notre Dame in the middle of chasing a national title to accept a contract reportedly worth more than $100 million to coach LSU is most certainly a new low.

Kelly should not even be coaching college football. Or high school football. Or Pop Warner.

Kelly oversaw a program that sent a 20-year-old student, Declan Sullivan, up 39 feet in a scissor lift with winds gusting at 53 miles per hour. It toppled and Sullivan died.

That Kelly was the person in charge of the program, sure to thump his chest about Leadership and Accountability like college coaches love to do, means he should have suffered the only sensible repercussion for running an operation that valued practice tape from a certain angle over human life: Getting fired.

Instead Kelly is jumping from one premium job to the next as minor league football teams masquerading as university athletic departments rush to spend the money that (mostly Black) players generate but can’t receive.

Do not listen to athletic directors who say paying players means they’ll have to cut sports

Kelly also oversaw the Notre Dame program when Lizzy Seeberg, a student at nearby St. Mary’s College, reported a Notre Dame football player had sexually assaulted her. A different Fighting Irish player texted her “Don’t do anything you would regret. Messing with Notre Dame football is a bad idea.” Overcome with fear that the player would never face any consequence, and that the athletes in a program she so revered growing up would therefore feel emboldened to continue abusing women, she ended her own life.

Confronted with questions about Seeberg’s death and his team’s possible role in causing it, Kelly joked that he couldn’t believe the Chicago Tribune still employed so many reporters.

The next year, according to reporting from the National Catholic Reporter, a Notre Dame student opted not to tell police about being raped by a Fighting Irish football player because she remembered the way Seeberg coming forward elicited only hostility and indifference.

So anyone surprised by Kelly’s lame text to his players telling them he was leaving them — a week after saying publicly he wasn’t going to leave for another job –and yet truly loves them hasn’t been paying attention.

Brian Kelly is a lousy person.

How does this man just continue on, being so completely full of it? The usual thing to do is ask “How does he look at himself in the mirror?” but I don’t think that’s a valid question. I think he looks in the mirror and sees whatever he wants to see, because college football has long been a system where head coaches are given too much money and power. They end up believing the world is whatever they want it to be because most of the time it is. They never have to assess how they move through it; it moves for them.

Just look at this. Seriously.

Of course Kelly is replacing a coach who has his own issues.

Why are so many great universities complicit in this mess? Why do we keep pretending that this is working?

At least partly because the softer and kinder narrative bundled by the schools and their TV partners is what sells — and selling is the most important thing. That’s why LSU felt the need to go get a “big” name when certainly any number of coaches without nearly as many red flags could have succeeded at a school with the resources it offers. But the boosters demanded something splashy.

All the while, you can already hear the announcers avoiding what’s really going on here when the games resume and the playoff picture is sorted out. We’ll hear stories of Notre Dame players banding together to persevere through the loss of their coach, as if something tragic has happened. We’ll be bombarded with talk of new hope in Baton Rouge — where they’ve had to endure a national title drought of two whole years, the sorrow. Because TV money fuels this whole thing, the coverage is all burnished to present storylines that feel like something out of a movie rather than anything resembling even a dim reflection of what’s actually going on in these programs.

It’s all a show. Sometimes the odious characters take a starring role. It might be entertaining if it didn’t leave so much real pain behind.

[mm-video type=playlist id=01f09p3bf720d8rg02 player_id=none image=https://ftw.usatoday.com/wp-content/plugins/mm-video/images/playlist-icon.png]

[listicle id=1308694]