Cutting Through The Coach Speak: Spartan Decor

[insert new employer here].” If you hold out hope for any statement that’s stronger or more transparent than that, your Delta Tau Chi pledge name will henceforth be Don Quixote. The public votes of confidence are meaningless. Please don’t stir yourself into a frenzy over them. Now… Doesn’t that feel better? There’s plenty of more meaningful stuff to discuss from the press conference. Let’s move on.

A Sense of Urgency

If you’re a glass half full kind of person, you’ll read Kelly’s comments on his team’s sense of urgency and think that things could be much better if they can provide a more even performance. If you’re a glass half empty kind of person, you’ll wonder how in the heck these guys could possibly lack a sense of urgency at any point against the #12 team, and what that might say about their ability to focus in any situation. For my part, although I’m typically an optimistic sort, I’m vaguely troubled that this was an issue on Saturday.

This is a combination of Kelly’s opening remarks and some answers, all with urgency as a theme:

We obviously compete unevenly, if you will, in a manner that would probably characterize as we lack a sense of urgency in the way we play. We play in spurts. We play really well for a period of time, and then we kind of don’t play at the highest level necessary against really good competition. So finding that sense of urgency, that attention to detail that’s absolutely crucial to being a really good football team, and we can’t be the kind of football team that we want to be unless we play with a sense of urgency for four quarters. We do some really good things, and then we do some really sloppy things.

To be the kind of football team we want to be, we have to eliminate that. We have to eliminate it in our preparation. We have to eliminate it in the way we go to work every single day. And then we’ve got to be able to make certain that there’s an attention to detail and that urgency that I just mentioned begins to show itself…

Now three weeks into it, it’s pretty clear that we’ve got a group that will compete. There’s no quit in them, but they can’t turn it on and turn it off. So the realization of knowing who we are and what our weaknesses are — a lot of us could go to work on that…

There’s some inexperienced players that at times don’t play with that single minded purpose, that, unfortunately, emotion plays into it, and it shouldn’t.

That’s another point that was brought up was that we shouldn’t be waiting for the ebbs and flows of games to carry us. We should be the ones initiating the flows of the games, and that is the makeup of this team right now that needs to change…

[Kizer]’s got to play with more sense of urgency. He’s one of those guys. We had seven plays in a row that were negative plays that are just unacceptable offensively. It’s not just him, but he’s running the offense, and there are plays that are out there to be made that we’re not making. We come out in our first drive, and we look pretty good. We drop a ball and make a mistake, and we lose that urgency there for a while. We have to is have that from the very beginning. That starts with the guy with keys in his hand who’s driving a car, and he’s got to have more of that…

My vague unease comes from my interpretation of this to mean that there’s a systemic problem on this team with guys staying focused, motivated, and engaged. Systemic problems tend to be not so easy to fix. I hope that I’m wrong on this one, because if we can’t get that sense of urgency up and play at a consistently high level, we’re going to have some closer-than-they-should be games against inferior competition and more close-but-not-quite losses against our more dangerous opponents.

Fixing The Defense

Lou Holtz, despite his offensive background, brushed aside Gary Darnell and took the defensive reins when things headed south. Charlie Strong, who does have a defensive background and also has a respected defensive coordinator in Vance Bedford, just said he’s going to become much more involved in the defense after Texas’s disappointing loss to Cal. WHY WON’T BRIAN KELLY GET MORE INVOLVED?!?

The takeaway that many fans had from the presser was that Kelly was not going to take over the defense, which in turn became a belief that he was fiddling with his offensive baby while Rome burned behind him. Note his actual words, though, which were much more expansive than “I’m not taking over VanGorder’s job”:

Q: I know you’re supporting Brian VanGorder 100 percent. But you mentioned getting fundamentals right, getting teaching right. As the head coach, do you feel compelled to kind of shift your emphasis, your time, over to the other side of the ball while it’s in this state?

BK: Well, I have to be able to know that everything in the program is being taught, being effectively communicated on a day-to-day basis. So physically, does that mean on the practice field I have to stand on the defensive practice field to get that done? No, it doesn’t mean that. What it means is that I have to be in defensive meetings. It means that I have to be aware of what the game plan is. It means that I have to know how we’re teaching things and communicating them, which I do.

So I don’t need a headset. I don’t need to be on the defensive side of the ball coaching tackling. I’m very confident that I’ve got good coaches to do that, but I’m the head coach, and I’d better be certain that I know exactly what’s going on in all facets of my program — offense, defense, special teams, recruiting, all of those things. But from an optic standpoint, I don’t need to be standing on the defensive end of the field to make sure that gets done.

“From an optic standpoint, I don’t need to be standing on the defensive end of the field to make sure that gets done.” “I have to be in defensive meetings. It means that I have to be aware of what the game plan is.” What Kelly is saying here is that he doesn’t feel a need to create an image of taking over the defense, and he doesn’t need to be a part of the operational side of the defense. It’s a clear indicator, however, that he will be very involved in the strategic side of it – the big picture of how we approach defense and how we communicate it to the players. It’s a classic CEO approach to fixing a problem business unit. It’s not the CEO’s job to do the report for you; it’s his job to understand how you’re doing it and redirect you as needed. I’m not saying that getting directly involved, as Lou did, is wrong, just that there is definitely logic behind Kelly’s approach and it fits what we know of him as a CEO coach.

I would also take the “I’m very confident that I’ve got good coaches to do that” to carry with it an implied job requirement – I’m not here to get bogged down in details because you can’t handle them, so make damn sure you handle them. And, finally, “I have to be able to know that everything in the program is being taught, being effectively communicated on a day-to-day basis” hearkens once again back to a comment Kelly made to the South Bend Tribune in the preseason, to the effect that VanGorder would be in trouble if Kelly didn’t believe things were being effectively communicated. The dots aren’t hard to connect.

The final question of the conference touched on this theme again, in what was a good representative question of a lot of fans’ thoughts:

Q: …I think from the outside looking in, the reason you get that question so much of why don’t you spend time with the defense, the perception is Mike Denbrock has been with you forever. He knows the offense. Mike Sanford was brought in to really help augment some thinking there. If the boss goes over to the defensive side of the ball, perhaps then that sense of urgency on that side will be lifted up.

BK: Yeah. Well, like I said, the players know that, from the head coach’s perspective, that I’m aware of everything that goes on because I can speak to them about what their techniques are, what they’re doing, how they’re doing them on a day-to-day basis. So I can pull Nyles aside, and I can pull the DB aside and our defensive linemen, and I can talk to them intelligently about their defensive techniques. So they know that I’m in tune to what they’re doing, not, hey, what did you do on that play?

Translation: “Don’t kid yourself. I know exactly what’s going on.” Is Brian Kelly the Richard Daley of Notre Dame football? Probably not. But a guy as obsessively detail-oriented as he is wouldn’t float along trusting everything to be fine on the other side of the wall.

SRFSIM

That’s a favored NDNation acronym for Kelly, which many of you are probably familiar with – Screaming Red-Faced Shanty Irish Mick. Classy bunch, that… I enjoyed this exchange tremendously:

Q: How have you handled defensive issues in the past?

BK: Scored more points.

Q: Is there anything — nothing else like being more active or anything else?

BK: No. I think certainly there are some things that you can do and some that you can’t. If you’re doing all the things fundamentally, as I just kind of alluded to, if you believe that all the things that you can do as a coach and all the things that you’re doing from preparation are being covered, then there’s not much more you can do other than believing in your players, working to get better each and every week, and sticking by them so that they improve and get better as the year progresses.

The guy we affectionately call BFUK – I’ll let you piece together what that acronym means – came out in this terse and obviously sarcastic response, and I love it. Kelly is an excellent politician, but every once in a while he gets a little edgy to remind people it’s not his first day on the job. This doesn’t mean that people can’t question him, of course, that’s part of their job. I just like that he gets cranky every so often – and as a bonus, this particular reply seems almost designed to make the gold seaters lose their collective mind. Kelly showed the politician side again by giving a thoughtful answer to the follow-up question, which I’m sure sank in not at all with the NDN crowd. Well done, Coach. Helmet sticker for you.

Many fans took him quite literally and went on tirades about how Kelly just doesn’t get it and is so arrogant that he doesn’t realize the defense needs to be fixed. For those people, I offer this classic meme:

 

On Public Dress-Downs

The NBC cameras caught Kelly making his displeasure known a couple of times on the sideline, especially notable when the ire was directed at Brian VanGorder. There was yelling, unrequited death stares, and a very demonstrative rhetorical question that can’t be repeated in polite company. This picture pretty much summed it all up in one uncomfortable moment:

You have Kelly obviously incensed, VanGorder looking like a kid who threw his baseball through a window, and two Notre Dame players and a Michigan State manager looking in apparent discomfort at VanGorder as he gets shredded. That, quite simply, looks like an awful place to be, regardless of what opinion you have of BVG. Kelly fielded a question about what the cameras saw:

Q: One more question. What do you think about the cameras kind of catching your interactions with your coaches on the sidelines?

BK: My office. My office. If it was in your office, they’d probably see your interactions with your employees on a day-to-day basis too. It just is what it is. If we were up 55-0, we’d probably have no interaction conversations… It’s just business as usual. It’s not personal. It’s about getting it right, and, again, it’s my office. So I think, if you have a camera in your office, there will be those moments that we all have that people would ask what was going on.

I like the parallel between this reply and the oft-stated “if we all had someone watching us this closely in our jobs, we wouldn’t smell like roses either.” I like that he didn’t completely deflect it as meaningless or tension-free; in fact, by itself, it doesn’t seem like there’s much coachspeak to cut through in this reply. However, when you add the context of that picture, and the fact that it’s a microcosm of Kelly’s interactions with VanGorder throughout the Michigan State and Texas games… I’ll just say this: If my boss had that kind of “interaction” with me in his office, without NBC’s cameras around, I’d still go back to my desk and start updating my resume.

A Chuckle To Send You On Your Way

This was a small comment in the scheme of things, but I got a kick out of it because it’s such classic coachspeak. And probably true; if only poor Bo had thought of this when he decided to kick to Rocket. Twice.

Q: [Duke safety and All-America return man DeVon] Edwards has also proven to be a dynamic return man?
BK: Very good, four touchdowns plus. Yeah, he’s a guy that we’re aware of, and we have to take special note of him in special teams.

Q: Will you kick to him?
BK: Absolutely. And then maybe not.

A little lighter fare to bring you up after some rough topics. Had I been in the press room for “And then maybe not,” I might have LOL’d. Out loud, as Adrian Monk would say.