Opinion: Brian Kelly’s move from Notre Dame to LSU shows college football has a real problem on its hands
to introduce Lincoln Riley as USC’s head coach on Monday was so full of grandiosity, athletics director Mike Bohn actually uttered the following words without even a hint of irony:
“It was never our goal to change the landscape of college football with one of the biggest moves in the history of the game, but we did exactly that.”
Bohn’s perch atop the mountain of coaching search bravado lasted approximately two hours.
Because for all the talk coming out of L.A. about shifting the paradigm of the sport by hiring Riley, LSU pulling Brian Kelly out of Notre Dame one-upped it in a manner that is even more shocking for an industry whose alarm bells should now be fully blaring.
Coaches change jobs all the time, and desperate schools do desperate things this time of year. But for Kelly to leave Notre Dame high and dry when his team still has a chance to win a national championship is both something we’ve never really seen in college football and a rubicon crossed that takes the sport down a perilous path.
How does anyone continue to pretend that this is amateur sports when a multi-million dollar coach leaves his players in the lurch while they could still end up playing for history? How does anyone take the sanctity of the College Football Playoff seriously when it means so little to Kelly that he high-tails it out of town before he even knows whether his team gets in?
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OPINION:Lincoln Riley to USC was a no-brainer. He avoids SEC mayhem, has shot at a championship.
Just two days ago, after Notre Dame finished off an 11-1 season with a blowout win over Stanford, Kelly said the following: “We’ve got one of the best four teams in my mind in the country, without question, and we’re ready to prove it.”