Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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murphy's Law dan murphy recalled their budget was about the same as what Michigan spent on athletic tape in a year. On a trip to Indianapolis, the team's discount hotel didn't have a meeting room large enough to fit all 60 players, so they went through their game plan in the parking lot. When an October snow covered the team's practice field, Kelly's staff used a bulldozer as a plow. It removed as much grass as it did snow and left behind a patch of frozen mud where Hull and his teammates practiced for the rest of the year. Now, Kelly's Notre Dame team sleeps comfortably in a hotel before even its home games and meets in a massive team auditorium on campus with the program's former bowl wins plastered on the walls. Down the hall is the indoor practice facility for snowy days and across the street are three more full practice fields at his disposal. Kelly has come a long way in his quarter century in the coaching world. As the second youngest (51 years, 310 days old) coach to reach the 200-win milestone, he still has plenty of room to keep going. The only man to get to 200 at a younger age was Pop Warner. Only Penn State's Joe Paterno, Nebraska's Tom Osborne, Michigan's Bo Schembechler and Ohio State's Woody Hayes — a Mount Rushmore quartet of Midwestern coaches — got there in fewer games than the 270 it took Kelly. He's been driven this far by a passionate need to do better. That's what pushed him to leave a secure job in Massachusetts politics to be a Division III softball coach at Assumption College. It's what carried him from Central Michigan to Cincinnati and then to Notre Dame in a warp-speed rise to one of the sport's most coveted jobs. It's what gave him the faith to take a sturdy seven- to nine-win per year program at Grand Valley State and tear it apart to start anew. "He could've very easily kept the system we had in place," Hull said. "He didn't want to just win. He wanted to win a championship." He won two of them. That upward inertia, the pull toward bigger and better, might be the one thing that can keep Kelly from winning another, and eventually joining those coaching luminaries with whom he's currently keeping pace. It's been a full decade since Kelly has stuck around in one place for longer than three years. He sped through his last three stops like a real estate flipper. In January, he entertained the thought of moving to the National Football League after his three seasons at Notre Dame. He decided that he preferred to stay at the college level. For now. As long as he continues to win, those options will continue to be available. Kelly's track record indicates that sooner or later that drive will carry him out of South Bend. In the meantime, Notre Dame and its coach can plan to keep on winning. ✦ Dan Murphy has been a writer for Blue & Gold Illustrated since August 2011. He can be reached at dmurphy@blueandgold.com