Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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more and more to evaluate the "noise" surrounding his football program. Make no mistake. The C all it a blessing and a curse at the same time, but with each passing week, Brian Kelly is being asked Notre Dame head coach loves all the "noise." It clearly beats the sound of silence. But with "noise" comes The "Noise" Is Getting Loud Around Here UPON FURTHER REVIEW TODD D. BURLAGE the Irish since 2006, and possibly more. Notre Dame did almost everything right through the first half of the sea- son, using two key elements as the roots to a potential renaissance. possible diversion, and with diversion comes mistakes, and with mistakes come po- tential losses — a domino ef- fect that Kelly spends as much time guarding against as he does devising game plans. "Here at Notre Dame you have to make sure you com- municate directly with your players about all of those out- side distractions," said Kelly, offering his definition of noise. "And I make sure to do that each week. … I think I'm seasoned enough to know what 'noise' is and how it affects 18- to 21-year-olds on a day-to-day basis." With the 12-game regular season reaching the halfway point Saturday against Stanford, expect the decibel level around the Irish program to only rise in the final six games. Meanwhile, the balancing act for Kelly will remain the same — embrace the avalanche of attention while deflecting distraction during this march toward the first Bowl Championship Series appearance for Head coach Brian Kelly wants his team to tune out all outside distractions and focus on getting better every day. PHOTO BY BILL PANZICA realizing that his reliance on the quick- strike, high-scoring offensive style he used at Cincinnati was not going to be a formula for sustained success at Notre Dame. In Kelly's back-to-back BCS appear- Kelly deserves tremendous credit for FLEXIBLE PHILOSOPHY ances at Cincinnati, his supercharged offenses were shut down in the 2009 Orange Bowl, 20-7, by Virginia Tech's No. 7 defense, and in the 2010 Sugar Bowl, 51-24, by Florida's No. 4 de- fense. "I've had to run an offense that scored more points than the defense