Brian Kelly’s teams usually win coming off the bye. Looking at his teams’ performances after a week with no game, a pretty standard definition of a “bye week,” and going back to the 2004 season, Kelly is 8-3 overall, and 2-1 since coming to Notre Dame. Taking a bit of the shine off the Dome, as it were, his 2011 loss to USC was one for the ages and one in which there was plenty of blame to be passed around coaches and players. In short, while his teams usually win, and win convincingly, after a week off, it still remains to be seen whether or not 2011 was a fluke or the start of a new trend. 

Coach Kelly has been a head coach since 1991, when he took over at Grand Valley State. I don’t include any of those years because their athletics website does not provide access to data past the 2002 season. That said, in 2002 and 2003, Grand Valley State did not have a bye week and participated in the DII playoff, winning both years. So, for purposes of this article, I started my analysis with Kelly’s first season, 2004, at Central Michigan, and looked at each season in which his squads had a week without a game. You will note that his 2008 and 2009 Cincinatti teams had two bye weeks each of those years. If you go back and look at their schedules, you will see that Cincinatti was playing anyone, anywhere, at any time. They may have even played on a Tuesday. Not sure. For what it’s worth, based on his past, Brian Kelly is the perfect coach for Swarbrick’s barn-storming approach to scheduling.

Anyway, here’s the table:

Kelly started his bye experience with a loss in his first season at Central Michigan. Then, he went on a four season streak of wins, bringing him to the 2008 season in which his Bearcats lost to Connecticut, 40-16. That game was Tony Pike’s first game back after breaking his non-throwing arm a few weeks earlier, and he only played the first half. To further add to the Bearcats’ pain, they could only manage 30 yards rushing against UConn and were oh-fer on third-down conversion attempts.

The next loss for a Kelly-coached team is one that is all too fresh and familiar for Irish fans, the 2011 debacle against USC. Our very own Biscuit placed “100%” of the blame on both the players and the coaches for that loss. While this may violate some rule of the base-ten number system, Biscuit’s point was that players and coaches were equally responsible for the defeat. I think it is more than fair to blame the coaches for allowing the team to come out flat, a pretty much inexcusable thing off the bye. Add in the home game/traditional rival/night game/Crazy Train aspects of that particular game, and it’s clear to me that Kelly and his staff dropped the ball coming off the bye in 2011. That said, if Dayne didn’t “drop the ball,” we could be discussing the 2011 USC game in a much different light. Last season’s post-bye match was the Shamrock Series sensation against Miami, in which the Irish put a comprehensive beat down on a rebuilding Miami squad.    

The results of this season’s bye week will be very interesting to analyze, for the Irish are very much a team on the come, defensively, minus ASU’s last drive. Offensively, the running game is falling into place, but the passing game is still very much “hit or interception.” Our post-bye foe is once again USC, and they’ve got more problems than Jay-Z. Playing tonight against Arizona, they desperately need a win to kick off the Ed Orgeron year(-s), brush the stank of Lane Kiffin off their shoulders and maybe somehow keep their PAC-12 aspirations in tact.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Here’s hoping this week’s week off is as good for Notre Dame as it usually is for Brian Kelly’s teams.

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Bayou Irish

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Hating Hurricanes Since 1990.

Bayou Irish is a Jersey boy and Double Domer who fell under New Orleans' spell in 1995. He's been through Katrina and fourteen years in the Coast Guard, so we cut him some slack, mostly in the form of HLS-subsidized sazeracs. But, when he's not face down on the bar and communing with the ghosts of Faulkner and Capote at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone, he's our man in SEC-land, doing his best to convince everyone around him that Graduation Success Rate is a better indicator of success than the number of MNC's won in the last five years.

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