Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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terested in creating play- ers and developing play- ers that just love hard work." The process takes faith. It can be pains- takingly slow at times. Kelly's previous stops have generally made sig- nificant gains in the third year, but he says there is no timeline for getting his players to fall in line. Nor do wins necessarily mean that the message is taking hold. The tricky part about selling play- ers on a day-to-day ap- proach is that the lone real validation comes from the one thing the staff tries so hard to keep from becoming the focus — results. An undefeated team makes the process look genius. A couple of slips or bad bounces and any real progress they've made is invisible to the outside world. That's the type of stuff that will make a coach turn purple. To Kelly, the key is finding a way to marry the two, process and results. Of course he knows in the long run the goal is to win games. His job is to break win- ning into enough little pieces that it's no longer recognizable to his play- Notre Dame defensive coordinator Bob Diaco's foremost goals for his ers, and as each piece is achieved snap them back into place. "It's just being com- mitted to winning. You can't win unless you eradicate all the things that go against it, and that is the process," he said. "It's looking at all of the things that go into winning. If I asked you the question, what do players are not necessarily about what shows up on the stat sheet. PHOTO BY JOE RAYMOND you don't know that there are so many fac- tors that you have to concentrate on and the details on a day-to-day basis that go to winning. That's what I think peo- ple mean when they talk about the process." ✦ you know about win- ning? Well, you score more points. "Well, obviously, but