New Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly sat down with small groups of the media on Tuesday morning for interview sessions. Here is the second part of the transcript from his meeting with the internet sites that cover the team:

Does Notre Dame’s fifth-year policy change the way you decide whether or not to play younger players? Obviously if you bring in an 18-year-old linemen he may need time to develop.
KELLY: “I think positionaly it does make a difference because you’re right, I think mentally and physically, there are a couple of positions, in particular the offensive line, that would from my experience mean that they’re probably not ready to play as true freshmen. But I’ve always believed, I’d rather play true freshmen. I’ve always had better success with a young man that plays relative to time management than if he redshirts. It’s just worked for me philosophically. As we move to that fourth and fifth year, as long as we’ve developed a good plan of action for that fifth year, I think we’ll have great support across the board from Notre Dame for those fifth years. But if we’re mucking it around and you’re taking classes just to take classes, I’m not crazy about that and it really doesn’t serve the student-athlete. If we’ve believe in those specific areas, which I think I’ve already outlined that we’ll have an eye toward immediately, we’ll make sure that that fifth year is one that can really benefit the student-athlete and there has not historically been any problems with that if you’re organized going into that fifth year.”

Can you talk about some of the qualities you look for in your coordinators and how important your experience with them would be?
KELLY: “First of all, when it comes to my coordinators, I really give them a lot of leeway. I set the practices, so once the practices have been set, because I believe that I do it a little bit differently. I need to have the pulse of the team everyday to determine the length of depth of each practice and then I let our coordinators go to work from there. It’s very much on them after I’ve laid out the template for the day to be prepared for that practice and they better be prepared for anything that may occur during that day. I think he’s got to be able to run on his own gas. He’s got to be able to take the room over. He’s got to be able to stand in front of the entire team if I’m not there, so he’s got to have great leadership skills. He’s got to be a great communicator. He’s got to be able to take the message that I give to our football team and make sure that that’s repeating itself.”

You had a lot of experience with Jeff Quinn and there are a couple of other guys you have a lot of experience, but if you were to bring in another coordinator you haven’t been around as long, would you use one of those two hands to hold his hand as you install the offense?
KELLY: Sure. I would be much more involved. When I went to Central Michigan, I did all of the daily signaling in practice as well as scripting. I script everything. I did it all as well as acting as the head football coach. There’s enough hours in the day for me to do that if I have to do it, so that’s why I won’t compromise on the staff. I’ll put the right staff together and I’m very, very confident that we’ve secured both coordinators that I’m very familiar with.”

Is the recruiting coordinator title less important since you talked about how the staff recruits as a whole?
KELLY: “Less important. We have an off-field recruiting coordinator, Dave [Peloquin], who does a tremendous job. I kept him on because of the work that he does. He’s somebody that in a very short period of time that I have a lot of confidence in. The recruiting coordinator as the coach will certainly work with Dave, but it will be in concert. He won’t be out on his own. I think Rob [Ianello] was a well respected recruiting coordinator across the country and everyone saw Rob as a recruiting coordinator and he did a great job. I don’t know that you’ll see the same kind of position here at Notre Dame.

What are you looking for from us as the media?
KELLY: “I don’t know what the ground rules to be quite honest with you. We would have to establish the ground rules. You guys have a job to do, but you also represent the interests of Notre Dame with your subscription members. By and large, I would think and maybe I’m wrong,  a lot of them are Notre Dame supporters. Is that correct? My expectations would be that you would want to provide content that allows your subscribers to continue to subscribe. I think I would have an expectation that it’s not a umm.

Adversarial?
KELLY: No, I don’t know that that’s the word I was looking for. Let’s just take a look at the speculations and the half-truth stuff. I don’t see how that fits in what you guys do to be quite honest with you. If you’ve got fact, you report fact. The job search, for example. There’s information out there that is absolutely not true. How does the reader now know when he goes, ‘Well, that stuff’s true, that’s not true.’ We can give you access and allow you to do some things that other people can’t do. Whether it be the Tribune or the Chicago papers, it really just depends on how we want to lay the ground rules down to be quite honest with you. Wouldn’t you agree?

Lou Holtz had a famous saying for us, ‘Abuse leads to restriction.’ I think the competitive nature of the media market feeds that demand to know.
KELLY: “Like I said, I think I kind of outlined that I know what your job is. But if it becomes misinformation. If it becomes, ‘I’m throwing out names and I have no idea,’ then it makes it hard for me to navigate that. If you want access to players, if you like to do things that others can’t do then we’re going to have to carve that out. We can treat you like the newspaper journalist or you could get some access that others can’t get. I think we’ll have to sit down and our next time we get together after this will be, ‘What’s the rules of engagement? How are we going to do this?’ I can tell you how we did BearcatInsider at Cincinnati. When I got there no one (cared) about Cincinnati football, OK? So we were just happy as heck to have anybody write something about us. So it was, ‘Come on. You can stand on the sideline with me. You can call a play.’

“But as we moved and developed our program then we had some things that we wanted to stay away from. Reporting injuries, well I don’t like to report injuries if it gives the other team a tactical advantage. You guys are Notre Dame guys. Moms and dads of Notre Dame players. There are some things and ground rules that we’ll have to talk about. At the end of the day, we want to win. You want Notre Dame to win. If Notre Dame wins and it’s positive, you get more people. Again, Brian [Hardin] will probably lead that kind of initiative because we haven’t even crafted it yet. This is kind of, I just wanted to meet you guys and give you guys some access and talk about some of the things that were on the agenda for where we are. We’ll have to sit down and say, ‘OK, here’s how we’re going to do this stuff.’ Then maybe you guys after this conversation can kind of communicate your wants, desires, concerns. Then we can craft back some of those things. I’d say at the end of the day, Lou Holtz is a pretty smart guy.”

There’s the perception out there because a couple of committed recruits have said that they haven’t been contacted by you.
KELLY: Do I seem like a guy that has been sleeping on the couch? Well then you can connect the dots.

Those would be inaccurate statements then?
KELLY: If I know all of the kids that we’re recruiting, which you could assume I know every single one of them, then  you’d think that I’d want to contact them all.

To be clear, you’ve watched every recruit on tape?
KELLY: “Yes and keep in mind, we talked about this earlier, there were some dynamics that as I got a chance to talk to the exiting coaches and the staff here that maybe there was not across the board uniminity, consensus in areas. Sometimes information is given on the way out that maybe wasn’t given when you’re on staff. I’ve been a head coach for 20 years, I’m a pretty good listener. I’ll listen and put all of that information and then make decisions.”

Critics have said ND stands for ‘No Defense.’ There’s some interpretation from last couple of games at Cincinnati giving up 40 points and that maybe the speed of the offense takes away from the defense. What’s your take on defense?
KELLY: “I’m strictly about winning and everything I’ve done as a head coach has been about winning. It’s never been about, ‘Well, your defense is no good or your offense can’t run the ball.’ I’ve never broken up the program in offense, defense and special teams. It’s all been one. I really concern myself more with how we win football games. I don’t care how we do it, I just want to win games. If you look at our schedule carefully and really go through it, you’ll see that we won one game 28-7. That we won another game 21-14. You’ll see some low-scoring games in there and some of it was tactical in how we played offense to get the win that day. When you have what we had at Cincinnati - a prolific offense, one that could score on anybody – you don’t put your defense in a good position when you play that way. But having said that, it wasn’t about our defense, it was about winning. We’ll carefully evaluate and look at it and if Notre Dame won those games, you wouldn’t be talking about the defense, you’d be talking about the BCS game. I don’t know if I’ve answered your question as much as you can’t win and go 12-0 if your defense stinks. You just can’t. You can’t do what we did over the last three years and win 34 and lose six if your defense is lousy. But you’ve got to find a way to play good enough defense in the times that you need it. And there’s going to be some times that you’ve got to win 28-7, there’s going to be some times. I think as the head coach who’s the playcaller, I have a lot to do with how those games shape up. Those 45-43 games, I was shooting threes from all over the place. To win here at Notre Dame, you’ve got to play good defense, no question about it.”

More so than at Cincinnati because it’s the next step up?
KELLY: No. No. Notre Dame was 1-4 in the Big East. Actually, 0-4. I do pretty good in the Big East. My  point is whether you’re in the Big East or out of the Big East, you’ve got to play solid defense. Nobody wants to give up the points we gave up. There’s no question, that’s not how you want to live. You guys know, there’s no margin. You better be absolutely flawless on offense because you lose the margin. I’d rather, as the head coach, have a margin in there and there was no margin. It was, you better score every time here. That’s not how I like to operate. I would say that you’re living on borrowed time if you try to go around outscoring everybody. It’s not a good thing to go to work.”

Have you had a history of being able to move guys from one position or side of the ball to another? Lou Holtz is a coach that was able to do that.
KELLY: “Where was Lou Holtz’ first coaching job?”

William & Mary.
KELLY: “My guess is that he didn’t have any four-star guys or five-star guys. My first job was at Grand Valley State. The guys I recruited didn’t even know what non-BCS was because they didn’t even have non-BCS visits. When your background is in getting players, you have to project, you have to be able to take advantage. I’ve always said if there’s a worm in the apple then just turn the apple so you don’t see the worm. You’ve got to be able look at it and this staff room it will happen more times than anything. Those boards will come up and all of those names will go on there and you guys if had your ear against the door, you’ll hear, ‘Oh, he’s stiff and he can’t do this.’ Instead of, ‘Tell me what he can do. I don’t need you to tell me what he can’t do. That’s not why we’re in this business. We’re in this business to develop our players and accentuate and get the most out of them. So let’s start with tell me what he can do and let’s develop that end of them.’ There’s a lot of things I can’t do. If you came in the staff meeting and started that staff meeting telling them what I can’t do, I probably would crawl out of here. Tell me what I can do. What are you good at? That’s to me that idea of, ‘Well, he can do this, maybe he should play here.’ I think Lou Holtz was good at it because we both have some similar backgrounds in having to do that because those are the kids we have. You can’t trade them, there’s no waiver wire. You’ve got what you’ve got.”

There was some confusion after a radio interview you did regarding the recruitment of quarterbacks. Obviously you had two guys committed when you arrived. Would you be entertaining looking at another guy?
KELLY: "I’ve never close the door on any position. I’ve told our coaches keep recruiting. Present players to me. If one year we take over the amount of linemen, OK well next year, there might not be any out there. So I’ve never really held to the fact that we’re not going to recruit another quarterback.

"I understand implications, I understand them clearly. When you’re recruiting two high profile quarterbacks, they’d like separation in the class. Sometimes it’s a logjam if you bring three in. But my model that I’ve used at a number of the schools is that maybe they don’t all end up at quarterback. Maybe they can play another position.

"I have a different ways of categorizing as we get to know each other better. I recruit power, big skill and skill. Those are the three categories, those are the only three categories I operate out of. Power, big skill and skill.

"A power player fits a profile for us. Generally, those are your linemen. Big skill is profiling out, if I could take 20 guys who are tough gentlemen who fit the profile at Notre Dame academically and were 6-foot-4, 215 or 220 pounds, you’d never be able to track whose playing where. ‘I don’t know, he just takes a bunch of those guys and some play defensive end, some play tight end, some are safeties, big skill.

"Then skill obviously have a specific, specific, strength in that particular area, be it ball skills, throwing it, kicking it and I’ve always operated out of those three categories wherever I’ve been and will continue to operate out of those three categories here at Notre Dame."

Did you create that model or did you learn that from someone else?
KELLY: "That was created. That was created and part of that was created when I was in Division II. If we were going to get say a kid who was a potential I-AA player or a MAC player, and he wants to play. I’ll give you an example, Ben Roethlisberger. He had a scholarship from Ohio State and he had a scholarship from Miami of Ohio and he didn’t want to play defense, he wanted to play quarterback. So we would tell him, ‘You’re a skill player for us. You can come here and be a skill player.’ It gave us much more of a margin to recruit those guys that wanted to feel like they could play another position."

You talk about getting 20 big skill guys. You don’t really care what position you’re seeing them play in high school? You’re evaluating the athlete more than a linebacker or tight end?

KELLY: "It puts more premium on a football player, a football player. There are definitely certain traits that make you who you are as a football player. I put a premium, I spend more time on that, provided they hit that big-skill profile. There is a big-skill profile.

"Same thing in power. I can’t take a guy who has all of these compelling (reasons). When a coach comes in and doesn’t hit that profile, he has to meet what I call compelling reasons. Give me the compelling reasons that he doesn’t hit the 6-foot-6 range as an offensive tackle. There has got to be compelling reasons. For us, Dwight Freeney was compelling reasons. He’s 6-1, but his first-step quickness was, we hadn’t seen anybody like that. So we use compelling reasons and get us focused on what I would consider the more important areas."

You’ve been in places where you couldn’t afford to care about whether this guy was a two-star or three-star. You mentioned that you’re not going to hold the hand of a four or five-star guy. Do you just completely trust you and your staff’s opinion and disregard star ratings?
KELLY: "No, no, I didn’t say that. I think there are some very, very smart people out there who have had great contact and know compelling reasons why he may be a four or five-star. For me to say that would be for me to assume that they don’t know what they’re talking about, and I don’t believe that for one minute.

"But at the end of the day, I’ve got 20 years of being a head football coach, and I trust my opinion too. So there will be a marrying of the two."

You’ll respect their initial opinion, and then make the judgment from there?
KELLY: "Yeah. I’m a big believer in gaining as much information as possible. We want every bit of information that we can get, and then I will make a decision based upon all that information. I think it’s  crucial."