Brian Kelly knows you probably don’t like him.

He says he’s mostly fine with that.

When the former LSU and Notre Dame head coach opened up this week about what went wrong in Baton Rouge and how he views his South Bend exit, Kelly didn’t take a defensive posture. Yes, he was fired last October after three-and-a-half years at LSU. He failed. Yes, quitting Notre Dame to take the LSU job before the end of the 2021 season was a terrible look.

But Kelly wants you to know he didn’t flee Notre Dame because he thought the Irish couldn’t win another title. And this is where a head coach with a politician’s gift for spin will remind you why coach and program never fully embraced each other during his dozen years in charge.

“I think I was mischaracterized, only in the sense that I didn’t leave Notre Dame because they couldn’t win a national championship. Those words never came out of my mouth,” Kelly said. “What I said is, if I’m gonna leave, I’m going to go to a place that can win a national championship. And that was perceived as being, ‘Oh, he doesn’t think he can win one here.’”

Yeah, that’s exactly how it was perceived. Because it would be impossible to hear it any other way.

Still, Kelly made a valid point explaining the differences between the Notre Dame job he took and the Notre Dame job he left. Kelly dragged this program out of the morass of Senior Day losses to Syracuse and Connecticut in the final years of the Charlie Weis era. He got Notre Dame to the national championship game by his third season. He made the College Football Playoff twice, though those teams proved to be not close to good enough to win it.

Kelly arrived at a time when it made sense to see Notre Dame in terms of what it did not have. No training table. No indoor facility. No video board. No relevance.

But winning a national championship here meant at some point seeing Notre Dame for what it can still become. And Kelly can see that now. He plans to visit Marcus Freeman’s program this fall, but he doesn’t need to experience the 2026 Irish in person to acknowledge it. Notre Dame now pays its coaches salaries at the top of the college market. Even Kelly is impressed by the program’s name, image and likeness operation. The admissions office allows Freeman to take undergraduate transfers. A new football facility opens this fall.

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In a lot of ways, the Notre Dame football of today is the Notre Dame football that Kelly wanted. He just didn’t know how to get it there. Notre Dame is better off for Kelly’s dozen years in charge because they set the table for Freeman to succeed. If Kelly’s greatest gift to Notre Dame football was dragging it into the modern era, his departure is a close second.

That makes you wonder if the Notre Dame football program of today is one Kelly would have left at all, although that misses the bigger picture: Kelly’s departure was necessary for the Notre Dame of today to exist. There’s no better motivation than a head coach telling a program with 11 national titles that it’s not good enough to win a 12th, even if he claims he never said the words.

“Ah, boy, I want to be clear and I loved my time at Notre Dame,” Kelly said. “We really had a job, a singular job, and that was to bring Notre Dame football back to being relevant. But part of that was that there was infrastructure issues. We had wooden bleachers. We had no scoreboard. We didn’t have a practice, an indoor facility. So there was a lot of lifting and digging that had to go on. Outside of also winning football games. And I can say this, they are much better positioned than when I took over the job. And I think that that’s my legacy for me.

“Maybe it’s not for the Notre Dame followers, but my legacy is to leave a program better than when you found it. And in all areas, we’re able to do that.”

On one national signing day midway through Kelly’s tenure, I asked him about another good-but-not-great recruiting class and whether the program could level up from there. He didn’t like the question, taking offense at the implication Notre Dame should be doing better. He talked about “shopping down a different aisle” in recruiting and how Notre Dame had a ceiling in the recruiting rankings outside the top five.

At the time, the viewpoint seemed reasonable, even if it was defeatist.

Freeman has since shown the value of thinking bigger and working harder. Notre Dame signed a top-five class last cycle, the program’s first since Weis, and is on track to sign another one this year. Freeman has already won in the College Football Playoff, where Kelly could not. When Freeman talks about “challenge everything,” he might as well be talking about the head coach who hired him.

“I think a lot of it is Marcus’s personality. It’s very warm, engaging,” Kelly said. “He does a really good job of developing those contacts and connections. In recruiting, Notre Dame is going to give you the opportunity. You really have to be able to pull a couple of those big five-stars or those elite players. And Marcus has the personality to do it. I’m not saying I didn’t. We just had four five-stars commit to us at LSU before I left.

“Here’s what I would tell you. It’s work. There’s no doubt. And the work that you have to put in and Marcus has put in has been significant and it’s put Notre Dame in a position where they have the kind of depth that you’ve talked about.”

Notre Dame is in a better place because Brian Kelly was here. That’s his point.

Notre Dame is in a better place because Brian Kelly left. That’s probably yours.

Kelly has a point. But Notre Dame is winning the argument.