Couch: As Notre Dame's series with Spartans ends, Brian Kelly's tenure isn't far behind

After this coming Saturday, Brian Kelly and Mark Dantonio will never face each other again as the head football coaches at Notre Dame and Michigan State.

The schools aren’t scheduled to play each other until at least 2026. Neither coach is likely to be around then. Kelly certainly won’t be at Notre Dame. I’d be surprised if he begins 2019 in South Bend.

Kelly can’t be himself and last there. A feel-good blowout win at Boston College on Saturday doesn’t change that.

This isn’t about coaching acumen — Kelly can be a helluva college football coach. The proof is at Grand Valley State, Central Michigan and Cincinnati, all of which he took to new heights, and all of which sustained winning for a while after he left.

He is also the only coach to lead Notre Dame anywhere near a national championship since Lou Holtz in the early 1990s. That was different era, back when Notre Dame had more advantages and fewer disadvantages. The Irish may never win big consistently again. Until that’s understood and accepted, they’ll never be satisfied with their head coach.

And they’ll struggle to find a better one than Kelly. They haven’t had anyone close in a quarter-century. They can, however, find a better fit.  

Kelly’s character flaws are beginning to irrevocably irritate the Irish. His postgame dress-down of an Indy Star reporter a week ago after a one-point loss to Georgia isn’t a regrettable incident. It’s part of who he is. Nothing new, just recent and removed from winning. Kelly is 61-32 in his eighth season in South Bend. But 4-8 last season went over about as well at Notre Dame as 3-9 did at MSU. You can get away with being just about anything when you’re winning. When you’re not, all of those personality traits are magnified.

Kelly struggles to bring himself to fall on the sword in times of adversity, which is part of being a head coach, even if the situation is actually someone else’s fault. He more often publicly blames players, coordinators and assistants. Seemingly every time he has the opportunity to look fallible and show his human side, he comes off as a jerk.

Dantonio, in contrast, is more inclined to take responsibility. He handled last year’s disastrous season better than he sometimes handled winning. He was rarely, if ever, combative. It played well. His dry consistency will help him weather whatever is ahead.

Kelly can be charismatic and engaging. He used to enjoy being accessible. The daily scrutiny and culture at Notre Dame, it appears, beat that out of him.

So did his own mistakes — none more grave than the death of student videographer Declan Sullivan and how Kelly handled it. Sullivan, you may recall, died in October of 2010 when the hydraulic lift he was on during a Notre Dame practice collapsed amid fierce winds. Kelly surely didn’t mean to put Sullivan’s life at risk, but he created an environment in which nobody was bold enough to tell him it wasn’t a good idea to practice outside or at least film practice that day from on high. In recent years, Kelly has been open with his regret. However, his lack of ownership in the immediate aftermath lingers.

If I were in charge at Notre Dame, I might have parted ways with Kelly then — after eight games. If it happened now, he’d be gone. He represented hope for Notre Dame football in 2010. Not so much anymore. 

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There have been other off-the-field issues at Notre Dame since. Some are more serious than others: accusations of academic fraud and sexual assault, the sort of stuff that unfortunately is pervasive in major college athletics. 

Surviving these situations takes tact. And it takes winning. 

Kelly has shown he doesn’t have the former. He’s coaching a 2-1 football team that, a week ago, hit its first speed bump. Kelly unraveled. And, again, he’s coaching at a place that mistakenly believes it should be a national player every year. Notre Dame still recruits well nationally. But every big school is on television now. The brand that those of us over 35 think of when we think of Notre Dame isn’t Notre Dame’s brand. The Irish have fewer wins than Iowa this century. 

Eventually, soon probably, Notre Dame’s 20th century expectations will lead to more strife between Kelly and the world around the Golden Dome. Kelly will handle it poorly. And eventually, probably soon, they’ll part ways.

Long before 2026.

Contact Graham Couch at gcouch@lsj.com. Follow him on Twitter @Graham_Couch.