Brian Kelly was greeted with some birthday wishes Thursday -- he turned 50 two days earlier -- and then someone jokingly wondered if Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly still had the requisite feistiness and vigor and energy.
"Ask our players if the energy is still high," Kelly said following practice.
It's been a bit of a big-picture week as much as Kelly wants to keep the conversation to Navy preparation, with a proliferation of questions about what he's building and the kind of player he's coaching 20 games into his tenure.
His answer Thursday: Not the kind of player he wants to be coaching.
"It's more about how I want things done, how I want this team to play, and I haven't been able to get it the way I want them to play," Kelly said. "For me, if they're going to do all the things the right way, and we're getting beat because the teams are just better, I'll be OK with that. But that's not the case right now. I'm not very happy about the way we handle the little things.
"They're all bought-in. Every single one of them is bought-in. I coach a style of football that I want played. We're not getting that style. A lot of the guys that are here, we're retraining. That's in their DNA. That's who they are. Here's the best way to put it: Some of them can't do it. That's our job to get them to do it. Some of them won't do it. And that's our job to take care of that."
Kelly drew a bit of a startling line, too, between the players he brought to Notre Dame and the players he inherited at Notre Dame -- the latter forming the group that currently affects the outcome most each Saturday.
"You can see the players that I recruited here," Kelly said. "You know who they are. We've had one class of recruiting kids that I've had my hand on. The other guys here are coming along. But it's a process. It can't happen overnight. They're getting there. We're making good progress.
"They're 4-3 – we easily could be a lot better than that… I don't want to paint a picture that we're so far away that we can't get to them, but it is a process. We're banging it every day. You keep hitting that sledgehammer against a wall, you don’t see the cracks, then one day there's a crack in it. We're still banging it."
Asked about center Braxston Cave's assertion that the Irish know how to overcome adversity entering the Navy game off a galling loss to USC, Kelly wasn't buying it.
"I think last year's team overcame adversity," Kelly said. "This year's team needs to overcome itself. They need to play better consistently. We had adversity last year. This year, our guys just need to play better football."
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