Brian Kelly Leaves Notre Dame: The Oxymoron of “College Football Ethics”

What lessons from Notre Dame football coach Brian Kelly’s abrupt departure for LSU last month? As so often, where you stand depends on where you sit.

Kelly took up the chance to elevate the Tigers’ 2021 dreary record -- 6-6 overall and anchoring the SEC at 3-5 -- enticed by a ten-year contract for $ 95 million plus multiple incentives. In the Southeastern Conference’s multi-billion dollar program to feed well-muscled young beef into the professional meat-grinder -- business as usual.

Back in South Bend, however, Kelly piled insult on injury:

• Using a Twitter message to inform the players he had recruited and led to the threshold (ultimately frustrated) of the College Football Playoff.
• Taking the phone call that iced his new deal as a distraction from a family dinner with a star recruit, with no disclosure during the homey sales pitch.
• Holding an abbreviated no-questions team meeting at 7.00 the next morning, ahead of his flight by private jet flight to Baton Rouge.

At both schools, the follow-on effects were immediate. Notre Dame filled the vacancy in four days. First-year defensive coordinator Marcus Freeman was promoted on an outpouring of affection, support and lobbying by the team itself, after its sullen reaction to Kelly’s superficial messaging.

Meanwhile in Louisiana, Kelly’s performative introduction was derided as a bogus attempt to transmute his New England origins and Midwestern history into an adopted southern accent. More pointedly, both the Tigers’ starting quarterback and his top-prospect high school brother, Max and Jake Johnson, promptly declared themselves unwilling to be part of a Kelly regime.

Time will tell whether the youthful Freeman will grow to be the Fighting Irish’s next Knute Rockne or Ara Parseghian; in the eyes and hearts of the faithful, he will definitely not be the next Kelly.     

For myself, I hold no brief for the massive industry of college sport. It comes hard, to endorse the inducement of young athletes with transient weekend glory and the prospect of an abbreviated professional career all too likely to end with life-shortening brain damage. Or, where even a fraction of the resources that build athletic palaces and pay the massive salaries of sweat-suited coaches could be deployed to libraries and research facilities and academic scholarships and the scholars to whom we entrust the education of our best and brightest. 

Which said, I forswear negativity or cynicism in the broader purpose of this inquiry. At the law school where I teach in a Masters program in Ethics and Governance, syllabus demands leave limited space for guiding themes and principles. So I look for opportunities to ask about some basics: What impels our human need for laws and codes of conduct in the first place? What different choices do societies make in the balance between incentives and coercion? With the fallibility of humans prone to deviant or non-compliant behavior, should we look to minimize the harm done by wrong-doers, or focus energy on leading by positive example?

The American economy and culture have two major sources for their metaphors –- the military, and sports.

• A corporate raider launches a blitz against its target. Companies competing for workers fight the war for talent.
• A successful mentor is the team captain. Career success brings recognition as an All-Star, or election to a Hall of Fame.

One of the finest trial lawyers with whom I was privileged to work, the late and great Peter Fleming (RIP 2009), drew upon his son’s experience as a D-1 football coach, to illustrate the personnel dilemma of a corporate leader:

“You work your butt off all week, to train and prepare them. On Saturday afternoon they take all that onto the field. And you’re stuck on the sidelines, watching while they surprise you –- for better or worse. Just the same with young employees.” 

It could be said that Kelly’s be-clouded departure was predictable. The broader signals of a tattered ethical fabric were there from the start:

• The 2010 death on a practice field of student photographer Declan Sullivan, sent 39 feet up a scissor lift despite winds gusting to 53 miles per hour.
• The suicide the same year of a sister-school freshman whose report of sexual assault by a Notre Dame football player received minimal attention and no school or law enforcement consequences for the player.
• The vacating by the NCAA of Notre Dame’s 21 wins over the 2012 and 2013 seasons for violations of the rules of academic integrity.

More immediately, not only had Kelly bolted his prior position at Cincinnati before the 2009 bowl games, with the Bearcats on their way to the Sugar Bowl -- he had done the very same in 2006, leaving behind his staff at Central Michigan to coach that team in the Iron City Bowl.

As it’s said, “Karma never loses your address.” Administrators at LSU might consider themselves forewarned by Kelly’s trifecta of premature evacuation. Post-season, before future years’ bowl games, they’d be advised to take away his phone and clamp him in an ankle monitor.

In the first act of Shakespeare’s Scottish play, the action is animated by the off-stage execution of the treacherous Cawdor. An otherwise minor plot device will echo to color Macbeth’s own fate: the traitor is credited with the morality of his final confession and his deep repentance -- “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

Subject to history’s possible revision, it may be said of Brian Kelly’s graceless flight from South Bend:

“Nothing besmirched his legacy at Notre Dame like the leaving it.”

 

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Comments

[P Weaver]

Jim, thank you for this thoughtful take on a sorry episode. As you know, I look forward to the day when Notre Dame will live its professed values and shut down its intercollegiate football program. Only then will this robust contributor to a better world quit cancelling out the good they otherwise do for young minds by permanently compromising those same young brains in the pursuit of the almighty dollar. Love, Pris (Full disclosure to readers: I am Jim's little sister and we've been arguing this point for years)