Notre Dame Football: Brian Kelly is moving past the decision that moved the Syracuse game.

As the 10-0 Notre Dame Fighting Irish prepare to take on the Syracuse Orange in Yankee Stadium for the Shamrock Series, Brian Kelly got up in front of the media for his weekly Tuesday presser.

Kelly went at great lengths to talk about this week’s opponent and gave them more than the usual amounts of respect. Syracuse presents a great challenge to Notre Dame, but one of the greater challenges this year for the Irish has been the travel schedule — at least on paper.

BK adressed the new way in which Notre Dame approached travel this year, and how they have limited “unwanted travel” for the team:

“Yeah, all year we have avoided any unwanted travel, extra travel. We have not visited stadiums. We’ve gone right to the hotel. We’ve changed up that routine, which saves us a good hour. It gives us another hour or so at the hotel to rest, stretch, nutrition, recovery. We won’t do that in New York. It’s just, again, it’s been part of a long-range plan on how we wanted to handle travel throughout the course of the entire year, starting with going to San Diego and staying on eastern standard clock, and coming back and staying an extra day. It’s really residual of all of that leading up through going to L.A. next week.

“So little bit of a change of schedule throughout the whole thing. We’ll practice here on Friday, and then head to New York.”

When it came to a specific question about the Shamrock Series game, and how he felt about a home game being moved to a neutral site less than a year away from kickoff, Kelly basically shoved it aside as something that’s no big deal.

“Yeah, I think we’ve already kind of dealt with that one. You know, back in January we thought about moving the game. I know jack was certainly supportive if we could have logistically done that. But at that point, once that decision was made that we were going to play it, we’ve moved past that. We’ve made all the appropriations for this to be prepared for this game. So we’re really past it at this point.

“If you asked me in January, if we had a conversation, yeah, I would have liked it at home. But after that, it was vetted and it was decided to go to Yankee Stadium. I’ve got other things on my list I’ve got to deal with.”

Brian Kelly isn’t leaving any room for excuses. Even though the challenge is certainly there, and many (including us) have written against the move many times since the announcement, Notre Dame has a goal to finish the season 12-0 and this is just another game — a means to an end.

That’s the bigger story here. It’s not the travel beating down the boys this week (or next) and it’s not about horrible uniforms. The story here is that the Irish are trying to finish the regular season undefeated and make the college football playoff for the first time ever.

Perhaps we should concentrate more on the tangible more than the tangible as Brian Kelly is doing. (It’s hard though lol).

You can watch the full presser in the video below. (PS... Ian Book is ready to play).