By Brian HamiltonUltimately, Brian Kelly has little choice but to say all the right things about Tommy Rees, because the freshman from Lake Forest is going to have to play quarterback for Notre Dame now, like it or not.
But with starter Dayne Crist out until spring after surgery to repair his torn left patellar tendon, Kelly continued to sound optimistic Sunday about what Rees can do as a replacement. Rees did throw for four touchdowns in a loss to Tulsa and did lead the Irish to one of two touchdowns against Navy.
"I think clearly he's a young man that we can win with," Kelly said during his Sunday teleconference. "He showed and exhibited that. It's not going to be flawless, and moving forward, we can clean up some things and help him a lot in certain situations. Our game plan was established. He had to maybe handle some things that were out of his league. But he handled himself very, very well."
Photo: Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly speaks with quarterback Tommy Rees. (Nuccio DiNuzzo / Tribune)
Here are thoughts from Kelly on Armando Allen's season-ending surgery, second-guessing himself (or not) and much more...
On Allen's situation: "Armando, we're setting up a potential surgery for him. We dressed him so he could run out of the tunnel one last time, because we were pretty certain he's not going to be able to play again.... He has a right and left torn cartilage in the hip, I think specifically the labrum. Very, very unusual. We treated the first one. If you watched him in the Navy game, he played hard, he played with great passion, but he did not have that second gear he had early in the year. We have not concluded it with 100 percent certainty until the surgery is done, but we believe some of this was a preexisting condition."
On those saying he put "playing his way" above winning with the final offensive call against Tulsa: "Not really, other than there's always those concerns when the play-caller is the head coach. If it's the offensive coordinator that is making those calls, and the head coach is on another side, maybe he's advising or telling them what to do in those particular situations, i.e., we're going to run the ball here and take our shot with the field goal. When you're the head coach and play-caller, it's all in one. Over my career I have not second-guessed my play-calling. You always look at the execution of a play, and whether the players are in position to execute it. When the lines are sometimes not clear, relative to play-calling and the head coach, you always come back to not the play-call and second-guessing it, but did we do enough to get the play executed."
On getting to six wins: "It really is about you want to win every game, but for us, six wins or seven wins, obviously the day of that victory would be a big help - really the target here is to get bowl-eligible for us. We'll take every game one at a time and we have no margin. But it's still the same goal, and that's to get bowl-eligible."
On the bye week plan: "We are going to give them some time, I think it's important they just get caught up with being a student. The athlete part needs to wait a little bit here. They need a couple days to be a student, to get back into a normal routine...then we'll try to steal a day to give some of the guys that haven't played this year some scrimmage time. We'll get a day of Utah, and then we're probably going to give them the weekend off."
On whether Notre Dame can accomplish much with so many starters injured: "There's so much more to it than just winning the game. Every fan that follows Notre Dame wants to have a good Sunday and see a win. We can still be moving forward and being closer and closer to where want to get to even without those players. We're establishing it the other six days of the week... I fall on the side that we can continue to make progress even though it's not how progress is defined, with these guys out."
On linebacker Carlo Calabrese and his injured hamstring: "Carlo Calabrese is much better; we need this bye week for him to get back."
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On freshman quarterbacks Luke Massa and Andrew Hendrix: "We're going to begin working with Hendrix and Massa this week, we will whittle it down to one. Were in a situation where we have to have another quarterback that is ready.... They become effectively the third, and obviously if we lose another quarterback, they would have to be ready to play."
On the Notre Dame defense: "Except for the Navy game, I thought we've done a very, very good job. Tulsa put up a lot of points this year. Forty-nine on a pretty darn good East Carolina team earlier this year, and we held them to 13 points. They have playmaker and they had better team speed than we did in a lot of areas. Coming off the Navy game, we talked all week, don't let Navy beat you again defensively. Navy and the performance at Navy did not affect how we played defense yesterday."
On recruits seeing negative publicity: "I don't really beg any of them to come to Notre Dame if they don't understand what we're trying to build here. The get the opportunity to meet with me personally, and in that conversation, we talk about what we're looking for from them and whether they want to be part of that. Every year you're going to lose guys. In that process, if they believe that Notre Dame is the right place, we'll get them here. There are plenty of great players out there. We're not going to lose sight of the fact that we're going to develop players and we want guys here that want to be here. We're not going to beg anybody to come to Notre Dame."
On what recruits will see the rest of the way: "A team that plays together, a team that's growing together. We had eight first-time players out there on the offensive side of the ball, their first time of collegiate experience this year. A team that's developing. A camaraderie. A team that obviously is going to see great success. Some are impatient. We realize that. That's why we want to be firm in making sure we take guys that understand the process is moving forward and the foundation is being built and if you want to be part of a winning program, these are the things we can give you at Notre Dame."
On freshman defensive end Kona Schwenke's debut: "He warranted the playing time that he got based upon what we saw in practice, and then on film he showed he certainly can be a productive player. He's not ready for a lot of reps. But the ones he had on Saturday allow us to continue to move forward with his progress."
On how he finds "gamers" in recruiting: "I really believe it has a lot to do with who you're looking for first. I don't think you just accidentally run into a gamer. You have to look for that in a person. What are you looking for? Are you strictly looking for talent and a big, strong arm? Or are you looking for somebody, if you talk to their coaches sand other coaches that play against them that use the words you're looking for in the recruiting process - toughness, savvy, whatever those are."
On the worth of verbal commitments: "It just starts with the word itself. A verbal commitment, really, has no binding effect. So for anybody to be verbally committed, it depends what means to you. I know what it means to me. But it's not the same with 17- and 18-year-olds. Unless you have a parent that has stepped in or somebody close to the young man and said, 'His word is bond,' you better keep recruiting him. The (term) verbal commitment doesn't mean the same to a lot of young men out there."
Source: http://www.chicagobreakingsports.com/2010/10/kelly-rees-a-qb-that-notre-dame-can-win-with.html
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