Brian Kelly has been coaching football for over 30 years and hasn’t experienced anything quite like what he’s dealing with as a coach right now. Kelly joined “The Rich Eisen Show” on Wednesday and updated the world on pretty much everything in regards to Notre Dame football in 2020.
Why is he optimistic that Notre Dame will have a football season in 2020?
“Because I think our university wants to have one,” Kelly said. He wouldn’t speak for university administration but also offered “if there are students on our campus, we’re playing football!”
On playing Navy on August 29th in Dublin, Ireland:
“Navy is gonna be a game, whether it’s played in Ireland or Bethesda. I think we’re going to play. I don’t have definitive, 100%, but obviously things are trending that way, we’re moving in that direction, we want to play in the fall…at the end of the day those decisions are going to be made by our president and board of trustees, not the football coach at Notre Dame, so let’s get that straight.
So FedEx Field just outside of Washington, DC I assume he means? That’s fine, although playing in Annapolis would be a lot cooler.
On how Notre Dame plans to handle social distancing with the football team:
“As we’re planning on no salad bars and spacing in the locker room and the weight room and some of these really important issues so you can in fact avoid a hot spot or the potential of what the worst case scenario could be, you start and then you have to shut down“
On what the players most want to know:
“The players just want to know dates and times. They want to be in the position where they can put on the calendar. The problem is we can’t give them that because everything is staged in terms of the states and universities. They want to wait as long as they can because they want to get better testing, they want to get better tracing, they want to get where are we going to quarantine and and those things take more time.”
On uniqueness of getting players back on campus:
“It gets to the point where I know it’s frustrating for them, but they know that we’re doing all the planning necessary, because here’s where it’s a little different than year’s past.”
“We have to over-communicate with the parents. If it’s my kid I’m not putting him on a plane to South Bend. I better know exactly what’s in place for my son when he gets there that he’s not going to get sick.”
You can watch the entire interview, complete with a Brian Kelly head-shot from probably 2011, below.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCFLmqjL0Ks&w=560&h=315]