A Story Resurfaces About the Time Brian Kelly Invited Grad Assistants Matt LaFleur Robert Saleh to a Party, Then Made Them Shovel Snow and Park Cars
Ezra Shaw. Getty Images.There's obviously been a lot of speculation as to why Brian Kelly would choose now of all moments to abandon ship on a program that he had steaming full speed ahead into the playoffs and built to cruise ahead for the foreseeable future. And why he'd choose to ditch a school that sings the Alma Mater at the end of every game:
Notre Dame, our mother,
tender, strong and true,
proudly in the heavens
gleams thy gold and blue.
Glory’s mantle cloaks thee,
golden is thy fame,
and our hearts forever
praise thee, Notre Dame;
and our hearts forever
love thee Notre Dame.
For the one that sings Neck:
Oh-oh-ohhhh,
Suck that Tiger dick, bitch.
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Not that I'm a moralist. I like a good chant about bestiality as much as the next drunken lunatic. But you have to admit this is a hell of a pivot from a guy who talked such a great game for over a decade. All about tradition, pride, honor, faith and family and all that. Even to the point that even in the videos Chief posted, he was calling his players "student athletes."
There are many reasons to explain Kelly's actions. Starting with the $100 million, obviously. Every man has his price, and his starts at nine figures. It's possible he'd had enough of getting paid a private university's wages. Perhaps was tired of having to limit his recruiting to good students only, and then have to actually concern himself with them staying academically eligible. Maybe he just wanted to move to a warmer climate. And looking at it in the light most favorable to him, it could be that he simply needed the challenge of facing the competition in the best conference in the land week after week, as opposed to life as an Independent.
But I think looking at it from an Occam's Razor perspective, asking ourselves what is the simplest and therefore most likely scenario, I think we can chalk it up to the fact Brian Kelly is just a fucking asshole. The move to LSU is Exhibit A. The four minute speech to the players he recruited and got to sign commitments to Notre Dame is Exhibit B.
And now the prosecution would like to present this Exhibit C, from an article in ESPN from January of 2019. In a profile of Robert Saleh as he was being named head coach of the Jets:
Source - On a winter night in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Matt LaFleur and Robert Saleh thought they were invited to a party at the home of their boss, Central Michigan University football coach Brian Kelly.
Turns out, they weren’t on the guest list.
They were on the worker list.
"We shoveled the snow and parked all the cars," Saleh said. "Then, at the end of the night, we had to go get the cars again."
And then they went back to the tiny apartment they shared as graduate assistants and stood around their kitchen table -- the one without any chairs.
"We decided that when we’re in that position, we’re never going to treat people the way we got treated," said Saleh, now the San Francisco 49ers defensive coordinator. "And Matty’s lived up to it."
Sometimes we hold people to too high a standard. We bring our own biases to the equation, and think they'd behave the way our parents raised us to behave. We expect them to handle a situation the right way. With character. To honor their commitments with the same integrity they ask of others. Forgetting that some people are just dicks, plain and simple. And that is Brian Kelly. Rotten to the core.
I wish there was a way to express this without using the pejorative term. But I'm a true believer that you can judge someone by the way they treat - with apologies - the little people. By that I mean the people they have power over, but who had no power over them. Assistants. Servers. Entry level workers. People trying to hold down their jobs with dignity and respect. He sees them as manual labor. Pawns. Disposable. Replaceable parts in the machine that's built to serve Brian Kelly's needs. Whether that's winning the SEC title or throwing fancy a house party. He did to LaFleur and Saleh what Judge Smails did to Danny Noonan, invited them to a party and once they accepted, put them to work. Only replace "mowing the lawn" with "shoveling snow and valet work."
My sympathies to everyone at Notre Dame for the way they've been treated. And all the hard working graduate assistants at LSU trying to make their way in the college football world for the way they're about to be treated. Here's hoping Kelly never wins a game. Suck Tiger dick, bitch.