BATON ROUGE, La. -- Give Brian Kelly this: He operates from a position of strength.
The man played club football at Assumption College -- not FBS or FCS but club football -- and one of his first jobs was coaching softball at the school. Eight years later, he climbed all the way to head football coach at Grand Valley State in Michigan, which he then leveraged into head-coaching jobs at Central Michigan and then Cincinnati and then Notre Dame. And while no one in the history of Notre Dame football had ever leveraged Notre Dame, that's exactly what he did last winter.