Four years after gaining a mid-season vote of confidence from Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick in a humiliating season, football coach Brian Kelly won much more and more extensive on Saturday.
A contract extension, which had been burning for months.
Notre Dame announced at the end of the first quarter of the season opener with Duke that the eleventh-year Irish head coach has added three years to his existing contract until 2021. It is now signed until 2024.
“We’re going to get Brian to run our football show for the foreseeable future,” Swarbrick said in a statement. “These terms were agreed in December and we planned the next Blue-Gold Game announcement in April.
“When the university switched to distance learning in March, we waited to make this announcement until we can get back to the return of football in action. And I’m happy to share this wonderful news today. “
The monetary terms of the contract were revealed, but the old implications were clear: if Kelly coached at Notre Dame until the end of the contract, he would break the record for educational longevity of educational icon Kunte Rockne at school: thirteen years (1918-30).
As things stand, in thirteen months, Kelly will be 60 years old and will be the first in ND to train at school until she was 60. Lou Holtz was 59 when she finished her 11-year career in 1996. Ara Parseghian was 51 and Frank Leahy was 45.
“The biggest challenge for Brian to move forward is possibly his own success,” Parseghian told the Tribune after Kelly won his last contract extension on January 29, 2016. “A lot of other people that. The more successful he is, the more people will need to catch up with him. It’s anything you can’t see from the outside until you’re sitting in that seat. “
Kelly played in the first game of the Atlantic Coast Conference on Saturday with a 92-27 record with the Irish and 263-94-2 in his year as head coach of the university.