ACHTUNG: This is not a “fair and balanced” article. It is an editorial by the editor.
“The love of money is the root of all evil.” — The Apostle Paul
“Now y’see. That’s what’s wrong with this country.” — Ross Perot on the presidential campaign trail in 1992
I was more than a little disappointed with the news that coach Brian Kelly is leaving Notre Dame to take the head coaching post at Louisiana State University.
While it is true that coached come and go and gravitate to the school or position that pays the best, this development merely proves that Kelly is just another corporate liar.
Kelly won an NCAA Division II football championship while my son, Robby was running track and cross country. I am an alum of GVSU as well.
He moved on to Central Michigan University, then the U of Cincinnati and then Notre Dame.
When he was granted the job to guide the Fighting Irish, he very publicly declared this was his “dream job,” something he spent nearly a lifetime striving to achieve.
Apparently not.
Kelly inked a deal with LSU that will pay him more than $95 million over 10 years, very similar to the terms Mel Tucker agreed to with Michigan State. So yet again, money is more important than team loyalty. And don’t believe a big-time football or basketball coach when he speaks and we unwashed masses hang on his every word.
Kelly is not the first to play fast and loose with the truth. I recall Darryl Rogers insisting publically and adamantly he was not coming to the Detroit Lions while coaching at Arizona State. But he did.
Yet sometimes these deceptions can be innocent little white lies that might have excuses.
I recall running into Wayland girls’ basketball star Stephanie Ainsworth in the summer of 2020 at Robinson Dental Care, when I asked her if Hopkins guard Kennedy Helderop was accurate when she told me Ainsworth was going to join her on the court for Cornerstone University.
Stephanie said no.
Several months later it was announced she would go to Cornerstone to join Helderop, her brother, Jon, and to try to help turn a women’s basketball program that has fallen on hard times.
I forgive Miss Ainsworth for not being truthful because she’s young and perhaps was telling me how she really felt at the time, then changed her mind, or had it changed.
Not so Kelly, who seems to have made a career with not being straight with his school, players and particularly the press.
Rick Mills, former editor of Mt. Pleasant Morning Sun, passed along this interesting comment:
“(It) reminds me of the day in The Embers basement (at CMU) at a weekly coach’s luncheon — that coach Kelly swore to myself, my publisher and sports editor that he’s not leaving CMU. He was gone by sundown.”
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