Where will Brian Kelly be in 2027?
Plus, stop us if you heard this before: More drama in Michigan. And #TalkinSZN is heating up.
Is this the quietest sports day of the year?
1. What’s next for BK?
Brian Kelly won’t be the head coach of a football team for the first time since 1990. He won’t be coaching at all for the first time since he was a student at Assumption College.
He has been at the forefront of a lot of changes in the game. He has been caught from behind recently, too.
While Kelly made it clear this week in our conversation that he wants to coach again, what’s less clear is what kind of job he’ll want to go after, let alone who may be interested in him.
“I like the question in the sense that I think everybody has to be motivated by what’s going on in this business today,” Kelly told Pete Sampson and me on The Independent podcast. “We could be strictly transactional and the questions that I would ask in an interview is how much NIL money do you have? That’s one way to go, right? The other way would be, look, I know we need NIL to be in the game, but does academics mean anything to you? It means something to me. I’ve been in this business my entire career. And it’s surrounded by academics and it’s surrounded about relationships with players.
“The program that still carries that as a priority in their program are the ones that I would be interested in. Relationships with players, academics, developing young men, that’s what I love to do. And that’s the passion that I have. Look, it’s not sifting through contracts. And NIL dollars. That’s the reality of what you have to do, or you can’t be in it. But the real point for me would be the ability to have academics, a core for player development, holistic development, and that would be the right fit.”
