Patience, faith and strong partnership between Jack Swarbrick, Brian Kelly enabled Notre Dame reboot
Mike Berardino
SOUTH BEND – Sticking with Brian Kelly two years ago rather than using a 4-8 season as an excuse to dump him as Notre Dame football coach looks brilliant now.
In fact, that masterstroke of patience by Irish athletic director Jack Swarbrick hasn't just led to a 22-3 mark over the past two seasons, including a likely berth in this year's College Football Playoff. It may have saved Clay Helton's job at USC as well.
On the morning after Notre Dame finished off just its fourth unbeaten and untied regular season since 1950 with a 24-17 win over the Trojans, USC AD Lynn Swann, the NFL Hall of Fame receiver, announced the school was retaining Helton despite a 5-7 season.
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"We see top programs across the country have down years, and the fans want to change coaches," Swann said in a statement. "In fact, it happened a few years ago with (Notre Dame), but that administration remained committed to their head coach, who made some key changes, worked hard to fix things and got his team to improve markedly. That will happen here at USC."
That remains to be seen, but there's no denying the Notre Dame example could be used to buy time for struggling coaches across the land. Of course, it would help if those same coaches already had a pair of 12-0 regular seasons on their resumes — as Kelly did from 2012 with the Irish and 2009 at Cincinnati.
Now it's Helton's turn to sit down with Swann and attempt to fix what Swann termed "deficiencies in areas that include culture, discipline, schemes, personnel and staff."
They could do worse than attempt to follow the stunning reboot at Notre Dame, point by painstaking point.
NEVER A DOUBT
It was vital that behind the scenes Swarbrick always had Kelly's back. He was the AD when the school hired Kelly away from Cincinnati in late 2009, and their working relationship already had been forged through plenty of experiences, both good and bad, by the time 2016 went sideways.
"It was never a question," Swarbrick said of Kelly's job security at the time. "One thing that frustrates me is when I read people sort of reinvent that and say, 'Well, you know, this happened or that happened, so he changed his mind or he did something.' I said at midseason we weren't changing."
That was around the time of a 2-5 start, with all five losses by a single score. By the time the record reached 4-8, the second-highest loss total at the school since 1960, all but one of those defeats were by eight points or less, with four of them by a field-goal margin or smaller.
"We never even considered (firing Kelly), never talked about it again because yeah, wins and losses matter a lot but it's what you see in practice every day," said Swarbrick, hired in July of 2008. "It's how you see the kids grow in what they're doing."
According to Swarbrick, who built his legal career as a partner at the Indianapolis firm of Baker & Daniels, this is the first time in his 11 football seasons on the job that the Irish haven't had a single player on academic probation during the fall semester.
"That's where the program is right now culturally, right?" he said. "No disciplinary issues, just really great kids, and that's what you're looking at. Yeah, you care about wins and losses — a lot — but you're measuring all of that stuff. And on that scale, I have enormous confidence (in Kelly)."
Entering the season, according to the Associated Press, just four Power 5 schools had the same AD/football coach combination longer than Notre Dame: Duke, Iowa, Northwestern and Oklahoma State. Of those, Oklahoma State was the only school where the current AD hired the current football coach.
When the topic of external pressure from big-money program backers was raised, Swarbrick smiled and shook his head.
"None," he said. "I don't get any of that. I mean, it's just not the way we operate. I always say there are three people in the foxhole at Notre Dame: (school president) Father Jenkins, me and the head football coach. And that's the only three people involved in the decision."
That familiarity no doubt helped when it was time for Swarbrick and Kelly to sit down at the end of the 2016 nightmare. As they left the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum after a 45-27 beatdown, it was a far different vibe than the one that carried the Irish back to the team charter late Saturday.
Director of football performance Matt Balis, one of four coordinator changes for the program since 2016, received the game ball from Kelly.
"I think everybody understood a lot of things had to change, including myself," Kelly said. "It started with me and how we did things on a day-to-day basis."
Kelly cautions, however, against overstating the depth of the reboot. He notes the "strong core of young players that needed to be developed" and says it's the players that deserve the bulk of the credit for the 22-3 turnaround.
"We made changes, but we still had a core and we still had a foundation," he said. "We made some subtle changes to what we were doing on a day-to-day basis and a lot of them had to do with the way I handled things on a day-to-day basis. I don't want this thing to get away from us. We didn't reinvent the wheel here."
Swarbrick, standing outside the winning locker room at the Coliseum, was effusive in his praise of Kelly and his willingness to change at age 55.
"He didn't hesitate to look at everything," Swarbrick said. "I mean literally everything. That's really special, in a business that's pretty ego driven, to be willing to look at yourself and everything you do. And he did that in a dramatic fashion."
No aspect of the program was deemed too minute to evaluate. That's how sweeping changes get made.
"We both did — Brian and I did," said Swarbrick, 64. "You don't leave that season and say, 'OK, we'll just keep doing the same stuff.' You say to yourself, we're going to look at everything. The most impressive thing to me was when we sat down, there was nothing that Brian didn't put on the table to look at: personnel, the way we practice, scheduling, our approach to recruiting, nutrition."
It started with an overhaul of Kelly's coaching staff. Of his top 11 current assistants, just two — former Irish stars Autry Denson (running backs) and Todd Lyght (defensive backs) — remain in the same role they held in 2016.
"That's what you had to do," Swarbrick said. "When you examine, (it was) wherever that examination took you. It may have taken you to a personnel decision. It may have taken you to a different way you operate the business in some other way, but wherever it took you, you had to follow."
Follow IndyStar Notre Dame Insider Mike Berardino on Twitter at @MikeBerardino.