Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly says he was 'absent professor' last year

Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly said that unreasonable fundraising obligations for the program in the midst of the 2016 season "(expletive)-up last year's team." He also tried to make sense of what went wrong within the team in a disappointing 4-8 campaign and blamed his own mindset.

"I was the absent professor," Kelly told Bleacher Report. "I wasn't paying attention to the details that we needed. There were internal issues that — if a guy is on it, and he's doing his job as the head coach, he would've seen those things early. My flawed philosophy was, We're going to score points early while we're figuring it out on the other side with a young defense. Well, that didn't happen."

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Notre Dame fired several members of its coaching staff last season as a result of underachieving play, and athletic director Jack Swarbrick, who had signed Kelly to a six-year contract extension before 2016, felt the need to give the coach a vote of confidence. Kelly expressed frustration with that. 

"I don't know Jack's reasoning for it," Kelly said of the vote of confidence. "He's getting hit by guys that have big pockets. My reaction was, Really? You need to say something? If you've got to start defending football coaches after he takes a team to the (BCS) national championship game and a step away from being in the playoffs over the last four years, it's going to be a rough run for you here after being vacant here for 20 years."