Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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N BY DAN MURPHY With three holes to fill on his 10-man staff, Irish head coach Brian Kelly did something he normally doesn't do. Kelly reached outside his personal web of coaching connections and brought in veteran assistants Bob El- liott and Harry Hiestand. He stayed much closer to home to fill the third spot, promoting offensive intern Scott Booker to a full-time position. The coaching shake-up started by otre Dame added nearly seven decades of coaching experi- ence to its football program during the month of January. former offensive coordinator Char- ley Molnar's departure in December ended with an almost entirely new look on offense. Molnar left the Irish before their bowl game to take over as head coach at the University of Mas- sachusetts. Kelly expected to find a replacement and have a full staff on board by the first week of January before he was seemingly blindsided by the departures of running backs coach Tim Hinton and offensive line coach Ed Warinner. Hinton and Warinner both defected to their native Ohio to work under the Buckeyes' new head coach, Urban Meyer. Notre Dame was suddenly faced with filling two major gaps in its staff during the busiest month of the recruiting year. Wisdom and experi- ence were clearly high priorities on Kelly's wish list. Elliott, the eldest statesman of the group, brings 32 years with a whis- tle around his neck to Notre Dame. He was plucked from his third stint coaching at Iowa State and jumped at the chance to add the Irish to his extensive résumé. "My family and I are excited to be Before coming to Notre Dame, Bob Elliott spent 12 years coaching at the University of Iowa, from 1987-98, as well as six years over the course of three different stops with Iowa State. THE NEW GUYS Irish add a wealth of experience to revamped coaching staff a long coaching career of his own at Michigan. The younger Elliott rose to the rank part of this great university," Elliott said in a statement released the day he was hired. "I grew up in the Midwest and have spent much of my life in this region and always wondered what it would be like to coach at Notre Dame." Iowa has been home to Elliott for much of his life and coaching career. Along with six years over the course of three different stops with the Cy- clones, he also spent 12 years coach- ing under Hayden Fry at the Uni- versity of Iowa from 1987-98. Elliott grew up in Iowa City where his father, Chalmers "Bump" Elliott, served as the Hawkeyes' athletic director after www.BLUEANDGOLD.com of assistant head coach in his home- town and was seen as a shoo-in to replace Fry when the Hall-of-Fame coach retired at the end of the 1998 season. Instead, Elliott stepped away from the game after battling through a year of chemotherapy treatments designed to stop the cancer that was infecting his bone marrow. Elliott beat cancer and moved on to defensive coordinator roles with San Diego State and Kansas State, where he coached a group that was annu- ally among the country's most stingy defenses in the early 2000s. He has since returned his focus to well. He'll work exclusively with the safeties at Notre Dame, taking over the job from Chuck Martin who re- placed Molnar as the team's offensive coordinator. Iowa remains the closest he has come to a head-coaching gig, and it also provided the connections that landed him in South Bend this winter. Elliott coached both of Notre Dame's current co-defensive coordinators, Bob Diaco and Kerry Cooks, when they played for the Hawkeyes in the mid-1990s. Diaco worked under El- liott as a graduate assistant for a year when his playing days were over. The new coach adds to a strong the secondary, where he played for the Hawkeyes in the early 1970s and spent much of his coaching career as Hawkeye connection at Notre Dame that also includes strength and con- ditioning coach Paul Longo, who worked with Elliott for 10 years un- der Fry. MARCH 2012 59 PHOTO COURTESY NOTRE DAME MEDIA RELATIONS