With just five days until graduation everyone is beginning to get excited about it. To be honest, I’m not very excited about it yet. But I’ve still got a whole “work” week ahead of me to get fired up about walking across a stage and getting a piece of paper. Here’s a look at the No. 5 moment in the countdown to graduation.
Moment 5: “The day the music died”(December 10th 2009)
As we pulled back onto the campus of the University of Cincinnati on that cold night, REM’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” played on the car radio. How apropos.
Hours earlier Brian Kelly walked into the Westin Hotel in downtown Cincinnati flanked by police officers and he simply waved to throngs of TV cameras assembled in the lobby. He wasn’t speaking to the folks who all wanted to know the answer to the simple question, “Why?”
Why are you leaving Cincinnati? Why go to Notre Dame? They didn’t even make a bowl game! This team is on the cusp of finishing third in national polls and is undefeated? Why leave your players before the biggest game in program history?
It was his dream.
“Nobody does it like Notre Dame,” he’d say in a press conference the next day in South Bend, Ind., his new home.
On that night in the Westin Hotel it was simply a nightmare.
The whole city of Cincinnati wanted to know. It was so overwhelming that quarterbacks coach Greg Forest had to put out a tweet: “Please stop calling, texting me I do not know anything.”
He spoke for every one of us sitting in the team’s end of the year banquet that evening. It was so bad I turned my phone off, completely.
Quarterback Tony Pike told reporters that evening, “We listen to the radio and the news just as much as everyone else. It’s probably a little harder on us, because we’re getting the calls from our friends and family, wanting to know what’s really happening. It’s hard, because we don’t know either.”
No one knew that evening except for Brian Kelly.
It was the weirdest night anyone associated with this football program has probably ever had to deal with. It was such a fascinating night that even months later we sat in our team hotel and discussed stories from that evening. Everyone has a different take, everyone saw something differently, and every person has their own interpretation of what happened on that night.
I got to speak to Coach Kelly in the middle of April, ironically enough, about 50 feet away from the spot I last saw him in that hotel lobby. Now, as the head man of the program he’d dreamed of coaching for, he still remembered who I was.
That’s the BK we all remember. Ever so camera friendly, except for one night in December of 2009.
I just hope that never happens again. It was awful, but so memorable, and that’s why the night that Brian Kelly left Cincinnati to become the head coach at Notre Dame is the No. 5 moment on the graduation countdown list.
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If you’ve missed any of the other countdown stories, click the links below:
No. 10- http://adamniemeyer.blogspot.com/2011/06/10-days-until-graduation.html
No. 9- http://adamniemeyer.blogspot.com/2011/06/nine-days-until-graduation.html
No. 8- http://adamniemeyer.blogspot.com/2011/06/eight-days-until-graduation.html
No. 7- http://adamniemeyer.blogspot.com/2011/06/one-week-until-graduation.html
No. 6- http://adamniemeyer.blogspot.com/2011/06/six-days-until-graduation.html
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