SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Notre Dame players told athletic director Jack Swarbrick the program needed a high-energy leader who was passionate about winning and Fighting Irish football.

Players believe they got what they were looking for when Brian Kelly was introduced Friday as the new coach of the Fighting Irish.
“We could have went out and played a game right after we had our meeting” tight end Kyle Rudolph said. “His passion went throughout the whole meeting room, from us to everyone else in there. We went to breakfast and everyone kept talking about it, kept talking about it. I feel like everyone is very excited.”
The word Irish players kept using to describe Kelly was passionate.
“His passion was very contagious. That’s the biggest thing I took from him at this point,” said Dayne Crist, the only Irish quarterback on scholarship after Jimmy Clausen announced he would enter the NFL draft. “But there’s a lot of getting to know each other involved. I’m very excited to get that started. We have a lot of work to do.”
Kelly was 34-6 at Cincinnati, winning nearly half as many games in three seasons as coach of the Bearcats as the Irish did for the entire decade (70-52). He has just one losing season in 19 seasons as a head coach. The Irish have five during the same span.
“He has won at every level with every kind of team,” athletic director Jack Swarbrick said. “He is a winner. And he’s a winner that at every stop along the way has done it by doing it the right way. He was the right man at the right time for Notre Dame.”
Kelly called the hiring a dream job.
“I don’t want to give the impression that I was bumping into things as I was dreaming about Notre Dame, but clearly it was something that is a culmination of the work that I’ve done over 19 years of being a head coach,” he said.
Just as he did when he was introduced as the new Cincinnati coach three years ago, Kelly talked about having a five-minute plan, not a five-year plan. Championship-starved Fighting Irish fans just hope Kelly can produce the same results in South Bend. At 12-0, Cincinnati has one less win this season than the Irish had the past two, and the Bearcats are ranked No. 4 and may have been 1 second away from playing for the national title.
The Irish are nowhere near that close. Kelly wouldn’t say how far away he thinks they are, saying where the team now isn’t important.
“These young men want to win, and that’s why I’m here at Notre Dame,” he said. “I want to be around men that are committed, and we can’t trade anybody. There’s no waiver wire. We’re going to develop our players, and they’re going to play their very best for us. That to me has always been the most important principle. Let’s go. Don’t tell me what you don’t have. I don’t want to know about it. Tell me what you can do to help us win.”
Unlike his predecessor, Charlie Weis, who was contentious with the media in his opening news conference, Kelly was as smooth as a politician he once planned to be. He said everything the Irish faithful wanted to hear about embracing the school’s high academic standards and bringing in the RKGs, the right kinds of kids, he explained.
“I can tell you today is that our football players will continue to represent the model of Notre Dame,” he said. “I want tough gentlemen. I want football players that are mentally and physically tough, that will play for four quarters. And I want gentlemen off the field that we all can be proud of.”
He won’t have a difficult time stirring the Irish faithful. The school said 74,026 computers were linked to the news conference through the Notre Dame Web site.
Kelly said he was ready to get to work restoring Notre Dame’s traditions.
“Those aren’t 8-4 years. Those are national championship years. So any time you’re talking about restoring a program and the challenges, it’s not about winning the conference championship, it’s about winning championships and being in the BCS and being nationally prominent. That’s a challenge. We’ve got to get to work on that.”
Kelly came away from the meeting with players with the feeling they are eager to get started.
“They want to be led. They want to be developed. I could tell that immediately,” he said. “You do not come to the University of Notre Dame because you want to be average. You want to be the best of the best. That’s why I’m here.”