Brian Kelly Responds To Kirk Herbstreit

Brian Kelly has responded to recent comments made by ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit, who stated he would be “shocked” if there was football in 2020.

“Kirk does not know what he’s talking about. I mean, really?” Kelly said during an interview on Sportsbeat. “For him to talk in those terms … he’s not a scientist. He’s a college football analyst, so we’ll let the scientists determine those things.”

Kelly summed up my feelings on Herbstreit’s comments perfectly. Herbstreit is a quality analyst, especially during his in-game color work, but he’s also a respected voice of college football. When he speaks people listen, which means he needs to be more responsible with his comments. By making the comments he made, he wasn’t just some guy giving an opinion, he’s considered an expert.

Herbstreit did nothing but add to the fear that already exists in the country, and he did so with little to no expertise in the area. Reading his comments, it sounded as if he was simply responding to to media reports, which would be a poor idea.

Kelly was asked during the interview about when he thinks college football will return.

“It would be ideal if we could be back and operational sometime in the middle of June. It looks like it’s going to be very difficult to get a spring ball in, but I’m sure there’s going to be some conditioning activities,” Kelly said. “I don’t know if there’s really any competitive disadvantage from that perspective. … There’s a lot of things from common sense that we can make this thing happen, if in fact people continue to use good judgement.

“We’ve got 80% of the country staying at home,” he continued. “If we continue safe distancing, use masks, not overloading our hospitals and our health care we have a great chance to get to that spot …. If we do that the best opportunity for us is the middle of June.”

Kelly added, “July 1 is the drop dead date in that July 1 has got to be the day we have to start working out … That’s important for us to get our guys in a conditioning manner to play football.”

During the interview Kelly also suggested that Notre Dame would be taking a similar approach to what the SEC has done by holding virtual meetings with players.

“Beginning next week, we’ll start individual meetings and then position meetings talking a little bit of football, but there’s plenty of time for football.”

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