Brian Kelly Should Resign Today

Unless he, and Notre Dame University by extension, don't give a shit about the life of a student who DIED filming a Wednesday football practice for his crappy 4-4 team.

"Get in that damn tower and hit record! We just got beat by Navy for the third damn time!"

With winds whipping across most of the midwest this week like a burrito afterlunch through Charlie Weiss' pants, how stupid do you have to be as a coach to send a kid up into that death bucket?

This goes to show that college coaches are bigger maniacs than even the worst caricatures you can draw about them.

Remember too, this is a University that fired a coach for a 20 year old resume item that was an embellishment.

How chilling too, the fact that poor young Declan Sullivan practically KNEW he was volunteering for a death mission?

Sullivan tapped out two chilling Twitter posts before his fatal 30-foot plunge.

In the first post, Sullivan made a dark joke predicting his horrific fate.

"Gusts of wind up to 60 mph. Well today will be fun at work. I guess I’ve lived long enough," Sullivan wrote at 3:22 p.m., just as practice was getting started, CBS reported.

More than 40-minutes later, the 20-year-old junior from Long Grove, Ill., was frozen with fear as wind-gusts approached 50 mph.

"Holy ---. Holy ---. This is terrifying," Declan wrote.

Around 45 minutes after that post, the tower collapsed, crashing through a fence some 30 feet below and landing on a street that runs between two athletic facilities.

Sullivan died later at South Bend's Memorial Hospital.

I've seen these scissor lifts at Redskins Park up close. They are marvelous pieces of machinery. But also scary as shit. The operator lifts himself up with controls in the bucket or perch, and can even drive the thing around like a slow moving car. There are no huge outrigger feet that claw into the ground. There are are no ropes to tie it down. There is no safety padding in the operator cage.

Nope.

Just a nice huge, rolling, telescoping 40-foot death-trap waiting to happen.

It's the kind of heavy equipment that you would expect only a trained, experienced, full-time operator with some kind of liscense would be allowed to come near, much less operate.

But hey, in the Brian Kelly regime, they'll let students get up there!

So just running this through my mind, I wonder: How come this kid didn't say either...

a. Fuck it. I'm not getting up in that thing TODAY!

or

b. Holy shit. I'm coming down right fucking now! Coach Kelly can eat it if he doesn't have the oh-so-crucial Wednesday 7-on-7 drills on tape!

Talk about a lack of supervision! A football coach is the undisputed ALPHA DOG of a football practice. I've seen it. He has a specific set of things each unit is supposed to work on, exact times to spend doing them, and a heirarchy of assistants to help execute them.

To pretend that maybe Kelly was unaware of the danger, is frankly, preposterous.

If you are responsible for the safety of your team and coaches during practice, there are only a few things you would be really worried about. Especially from a "what could actually KILL someone" standpoint?

Running my players into the summer heat could kill somebody.
Lightning could kill somebody.

And... "holy SHIT, it is windy, somebody is going to DIE if they go up in the video scissor towers today!"

But hey, maybe they'll keep Brian Kelly. Errrr, actually, there's a 99.9% chance they'll keep him. The University will probably end up saying "stupid kid, shouldn't have been tweeting when coach needed him to focus."

Or they will say somebody told him to use his good judgment if he felt it was unsafe. Or they will say the video department assistant is to blame. Or they will sue the lift maker.

But hey, they will wear a sticker on their helmets in his honor. So they've got that.....

I know this much: the next kid up in that rig, better be on a full scholarship.