It’s been one year since Brian Kelly left Notre Dame — how do you feel now?

It’s been one year since Brian Kelly left his job as the head coach of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, and bolted to the bayou to become the head coach of the LSU Tigers. It was a day a lot of us won’t forget anytime soon — if not for anything else but just how wild it all got.

For myself, it was an embarrassing display of overconfidence in my own theory structure. While the rumors swirled and intensified throughout the day, I stood back (for a viriety of reasons) and offered nothing. I didn’t post a “rumor says” or anything like that during the day, but as the sun set and I had a few moments, I decided to type out my reasoning as to why the rumors of Brian Kelly’s departure were likely untrue. It was pretty straightforward, and points I had already shared many times before. I posted an article with the title, Brian Kelly is not leaving Notre Dame for LSU.

30 seconds later, the news broke that Brian Kelly was indeed leaving Notre Dame for LSU.

I quickly changed the title of the story, and published another one that had the report that Brian Kelly was leaving Notre Dame for LSU. And then I deflected my shame for the next 12 hours while thinking about the future of the program.

The future came quickly in the hiring of Marcus Freeman, but we’ll dive deeper into that particular part of the story at another time in the near future. Our purpose today in marking the one year anniversary of Brian Kelly driving off into the South Bend sunrise, is to take stock in how you feel about it all now.

I don’t think I need to paint a picture here for you as we all lived through the same thing for the most part. I will say that a vast majority of Notre Dame fans thought Kelly would fail miserably in his first season in the SEC West. All he did was beat Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide, and punched a ticket to the SEC Championship game.

So... Brian Kelly exceeded expectations at LSU while Notre Dame failed to meet the expectations of Irish fans. How do you feel about that? Are you optimistic about the future of Notre Dame football, or are you — at least in your own mind — resigned to a life of mediocrity?

The comments are open. Let’s hear it.