College Football

Brian Kelly to LSU: What's next for Notre Dame and Oklahoma?

Updated Nov. 30, 2021 11:46 a.m. ET

By RJ Young
FOX Sport College Football Writer

Brian Kelly left what was once considered a Yankees job — a job you have to be fired from to leave — to accept the head-coaching position at LSU.

In doing so, Kelly becomes the second coach in as many days to perform that feat. When USC coach Lincoln Riley told the media Saturday night that he wasn’t going to be the next head coach at LSU, Kelly must’ve smirked.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR LSU?

Kelly knows that what I wrote last month is true: LSU is the best college football head-coaching job in the country. I wrote, "It’s easier to put together a list of coaches who would immediately say no. And that list begins and ends with Saban, who saw the rock at Baton Rouge and polished it into a diamond capable of cutting down any team in college football. Everyone else? Form an orderly line because we all know you want a crack at this gig."

Some mocked me for this, claiming I overestimated the power of LSU’s recruiting footprint, pocketbook and allure.

Then Kelly turned around and accepted the position while he was the head coach of a Notre Dame team that could still make the College Football Playoff this season, turning his back on an 11-win season and a decade of sustained excellence in South Bend.

Your Honor, the defense rests.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR NOTRE DAME (AND OKLAHOMA)?

Kelly’s departure from the biggest brand in the sport is also an example of the harbinger I wrote about when Riley accepted the USC job after putting together a 55-10 record, winning multiple conference titles, putting multiple Heisman winners on the podium and making three appearances in the CFP.

It can happen to your school, and it’s likely to happen to your school. As much as we’d love to believe coaches lose sleep over their decisions to leave blue-blood programs, Riley told USC media on Monday that he made the decision to exit Oklahoma off the strength of a Zoom call and a nap.

His move so blindsided OU’s brain trust that they held a media conference Monday to assure fans that they’d find the right person to replace Riley. I expect a similar discussion will be held at ND posthaste.

Now the two teams that claim to have invented the phrase "Play like a champion today" will have to find head coaches who can lead their players to championships, even as a mass exodus is underway at OU and certainly is beginning at ND.

Moreover, OU and ND are essentially combing through the same hiring pool in a buyer’s market. At the top of the list for both must be Brent Venables, who has won national titles at each of his two stops as a coordinator, OU and Clemson.

Both will also have zeroed in on rising star Marcus Freeman. ND has the inside track there, as Freeman is the defensive coordinator for the Irish.

However, the man who raised Freeman as a coordinator is at nearby Cincinnati: Luke Fickell.

Fickell has long been linked to just two dream jobs. One of them is the place he played, stewarded and coordinated in Ohio State, and the other is Notre Dame.

With Fickell having put together back-to-back undefeated regular seasons and appearing to be a conference title away from becoming the first coach to lead a program outside the Power 5 to the CFP, he’s an attractive candidate for any big-time coaching gig, not just Notre Dame.

But he’s a fit in South Bend. He knows the territory he’d primarily recruit, and he understands the wants, needs and capabilities of the Fighting Irish program. If he were hired and could convince Freeman to stay on as defensive coordinator, I would think ND had hit the jackpot.

(I know Ohio State fans would like to see Freeman brought to the Shoe, too, to coordinate a defense that was embarrassed and run over by Michigan on Saturday — much like he once did.)

But I think Freeman is ready to be not just a head coach but also a head coach of a blue-blood university. Oklahoma has a track record of hiring young coaches in their 30s who have no previous head-coaching experience and spinning those hires into more gold than Rumpelstiltskin.

Selfishly, I want to see Freeman, who is Black, become a head coach because there just aren’t that many in this sport I love. I’ve written as much.

But this bears repeating: "ND has had only one Black head coach since it began playing college football in the 19th century. That came in 2002, when the Fighting Irish hired Tyrone Willingham, whose previous stop was Stanford … Former Cardinal coach Denny Green became the first Black man to be the head coach at a Power 5 program, at Northwestern in 1981.

"But since 1981, only 39 Black men have been hired as head coaches to run Power 5 teams. That's 39 Black head coaches in 40 years at the highest level of the sport, with 65 jobs annually.

"That means fewer than 10% of all head-coaching hires have been Black men. Just 30 of the 65 Power 5 schools have ever hired a Black head coach."

And there are even fewer with the kind of credibility and panache that Freeman could bring.

This is a unique opportunity for both Notre Dame and Oklahoma — who have each hired just one Black head coach in their history — to go get a man who is young and smart and has more than proven that he deserves the opportunity to lead the kind of storied programs that Riley and Kelly believe can be discarded for little more than their egos.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast "The No. 1 Ranked Show with RJ Young." Follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Young, and subscribe to "The RJ Young Show" on YouTube. He is not on a StepMill.