Brian Kelly’s Notre Dame exit further exposes how college athletes get screwed

Brian Kelly’s Notre Dame exit further exposes how college athletes get screwed

Sign up here to get Beyond the Back Page delivered to your inbox each morning.

The next time you hear a coach, commentator or fan abhor the idea of paying college players, allowing so many players to enter the transfer portal, or perhaps the most “sacrilegious” act of all, prospects sitting out a bowl game or the final few games of a season to protect their bodies ahead of the NFL draft (gasp!), kindly point them in the direction of Baton Rouge.

That’s where Brian Kelly will be counting his $95 million, making $500,000 more for reaching each bowl game (as if that shouldn’t already be the bare minimum for someone making $9.5 million per year), and preaching to his LSU teams about trust and love. You know, the same things he told his Notre Dame teams before abandoning his last one less than a week before it could have made the College Football Playoff.

Listen, we’re not necessarily here to blame Kelly for leaving Notre Dame to coach LSU. Perhaps he wasn’t getting the resources he had long been asking for in South Bend or was just ready for a new challenge of trying to get LSU back to the top of the SEC. Plus, who wouldn’t say yes to $95 million?