Players believe they got what they were looking for when Brian Kelly was introduced Friday as the new coach of the Fighting Irish.
"We could have went out and played a game right after we had our meeting" tight end Kyle Rudolph said. "His passion went throughout the whole meeting room, from us to everyone else in there. We went to breakfast and everyone kept talking about it, kept talking about it. I feel like everyone is very excited."
The word Irish players kept using to describe Kelly was passionate.
"His passion was very contagious. That's the biggest thing I took from him at this point," said Dayne Crist, the only Irish quarterback on scholarship after Jimmy Clausen announced he would enter the NFL draft. "But there's a lot of getting to know each other involved. I'm very excited to get that started. We have a lot of work to do."
Kelly was 34-6 at Cincinnati, winning nearly half as many games in three seasons as coach of the Bearcats as the Irish did for the entire decade (70-52). He has just one losing season in 19 seasons as a head coach. The Irish have five during the same span.
"He has won at every level with every kind of team," athletic director Jack Swarbrick said. "He is a winner. And he's a winner that at every stop along the way has done it by doing it the right way. He was the right man at the right time for Notre Dame."
Kelly called the hiring a dream job.
"I don't want to give the impression that I was bumping into things as I was dreaming about Notre Dame, but clearly it was something that is a culmination of the work that I've done over 19 years of being a head coach," he said.
Just as he did when he was introduced as the new Cincinnati coach three years ago, Kelly talked about having a five-minute plan, not a five-year plan. Championship-starved Fighting Irish fans just hope Kelly can produce the same results in South Bend. At 12-0, Cincinnati has one less win this season than the Irish had the past two, and the Bearcats are ranked No. 4 and may have been 1 second away from playing for the national title.
The Irish are nowhere near that close. Kelly wouldn't say how far away he thinks they are, saying where the team now isn't important.
"These young men want to win, and that's why I'm here at Notre Dame," he said. "I want to be around men that are committed, and we can't trade anybody. There's no waiver wire. We're going to develop our players, and they're going to play their very best for us. That to me has always been the most important principle. Let's go. Don't tell me what you don't have. I don't want to know about it. Tell me what you can do to help us win."
