Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/109499
NFL Detour? Brian Kelly decided to return to Notre Dame after meeting with the Philadelphia Eagles By Wes Morgan B efore the pain of a 42-14 loss to Alabama in the BCS National Championship Jan. 7 had even slightly diminished, the possibility of losing the architect behind Notre D a m e ' s i m p re s s i v e three-year rebuild dominated headlines. Two days before the title game, Fighting Irish head coach Brian Kelly proclaimed he had the "best job in the country — NFL, college, high school, whatever." Just hours after the loss, we know now, Kelly flew to Nashville, Tenn., and met with Philadelphia Kelly met with the Eagles on Jan. 8 in Nashville, Tenn., a day after the BCS National Championship Game, but ultimately decided that "my heart is in college football and with Notre Dame." photo by joe raymond Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, who had recently fired head coach Andy Reid after 14 seasons, including a 4-12 mark this past year. It was more of a factfinding mission, Kelly said, than it was a job interview. "I just didn't know anything about it really," Kelly said during a Jan. 29 teleconference, which was the first time he was made available to the media since Jan. 7 and more than two weeks after releasing a statement that he was staying in South Bend. "Quite frankly, I wanted to answer those [questions] so I wouldn't have to go through this. We're going to win again next year, and there's probably going to be teams that are going to have an interest in [me] coaching in the NFL. I want to be able to tell them definitively that I want to coach in college." Kelly explained away the dalliance as purely curiosity that needed satisfying, saying it wasn't a maneuver intended to squeeze more money out