“We’re going to be a totally different team on the field this year…”

I think instead of tracking coaches’ hot seat rankings, I ought to start a list of head coaches with the tightest sphincters.  Right now, my pick for America’s most pin-resistant asshole belongs to Notre Dame’s Brian Kelly.  As an example of how he’s wound up, check out this remarkable “I fixed everything” column he posted at Yahoo Sports.  It pretty much checks every preseason happy talk box you can think of, and in the process manages to make Booch sound grounded.

By the way, this really caught my eye:

… we have three new coordinators – Mike Elko on defense, Chip Long on offense and Brian Polian on special teams. Overall, there’s 19 new hires on the football staff, which shows the commitment that the athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, and our administration has made to getting things back on track here. They very easily could said, “Hire from within.” But there was a strong commitment to getting the right people here and doing it the right way.

Is it reasonable to expect a coaching staff with that much turnover to be running a smoothly oiled machine by the second game of the season?  I know what Brian Kelly thinks now.  I wonder what he’ll be thinking in the fourth quarter against Georgia.