Thursday, October 28, 2010

Brian Kelly Should Resign Today


Unless he, and Notre Dame University by extension, don't give a shit about the life of a student who DIED filming a Wednesday football practice for his crappy 4-4 team.

"Get in that damn tower and hit record! We just got beat by Navy for the third damn time!"

With winds whipping across most of the midwest this week like a burrito afterlunch through Charlie Weiss' pants, how stupid do you have to be as a coach to send a kid up into that death bucket?

This goes to show that college coaches are bigger maniacs than even the worst caricatures you can draw about them.

Remember too, this is a University that fired a coach for a 20 year old resume item that was an embellishment.

How chilling too, the fact that poor young Declan Sullivan practically KNEW he was volunteering for a death mission?

Sullivan tapped out two chilling Twitter posts before his fatal 30-foot plunge.

In the first post, Sullivan made a dark joke predicting his horrific fate.

"Gusts of wind up to 60 mph. Well today will be fun at work. I guess I’ve lived long enough," Sullivan wrote at 3:22 p.m., just as practice was getting started, CBS reported.

More than 40-minutes later, the 20-year-old junior from Long Grove, Ill., was frozen with fear as wind-gusts approached 50 mph.

"Holy ---. Holy ---. This is terrifying," Declan wrote.

Around 45 minutes after that post, the tower collapsed, crashing through a fence some 30 feet below and landing on a street that runs between two athletic facilities.

Sullivan died later at South Bend's Memorial Hospital.

I've seen these scissor lifts at Redskins Park up close. They are marvelous pieces of machinery. But also scary as shit. The operator lifts himself up with controls in the bucket or perch, and can even drive the thing around like a slow moving car. There are no huge outrigger feet that claw into the ground. There are are no ropes to tie it down. There is no safety padding in the operator cage.

Nope.

Just a nice huge, rolling, telescoping 40-foot death-trap waiting to happen.

It's the kind of heavy equipment that you would expect only a trained, experienced, full-time operator with some kind of liscense would be allowed to come near, much less operate.

But hey, in the Brian Kelly regime, they'll let students get up there!

So just running this through my mind, I wonder: How come this kid didn't say either...

a. Fuck it. I'm not getting up in that thing TODAY!

or

b. Holy shit. I'm coming down right fucking now! Coach Kelly can eat it if he doesn't have the oh-so-crucial Wednesday 7-on-7 drills on tape!

Talk about a lack of supervision! A football coach is the undisputed ALPHA DOG of a football practice. I've seen it. He has a specific set of things each unit is supposed to work on, exact times to spend doing them, and a heirarchy of assistants to help execute them.

To pretend that maybe Kelly was unaware of the danger, is frankly, preposterous.

If you are responsible for the safety of your team and coaches during practice, there are only a few things you would be really worried about. Especially from a "what could actually KILL someone" standpoint?

Running my players into the summer heat could kill somebody.
Lightning could kill somebody.

And... "holy SHIT, it is windy, somebody is going to DIE if they go up in the video scissor towers today!"

But hey, maybe they'll keep Brian Kelly. Errrr, actually, there's a 99.9% chance they'll keep him. The University will probably end up saying "stupid kid, shouldn't have been tweeting when coach needed him to focus."

Or they will say somebody told him to use his good judgment if he felt it was unsafe. Or they will say the video department assistant is to blame. Or they will sue the lift maker.

But hey, they will wear a sticker on their helmets in his honor. So they've got that.....

I know this much: the next kid up in that rig, better be on a full scholarship.

7 comments:

  1. And they KEPT practicing?!?!?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Reminds me of the Texas A&M bonfire disaster. But there was no warning in Texas before the collapse.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is a senseless tragedy and my prayers are with Declan's family, but I gotta wonder why Declan is "tweeting" rather than declining the lift or screaming for his life.
    Many people failed in this instance, and they should be punished, but Declan knew he was in serious trouble and all he did was tweet. Stupid tragedy, just fucking stupid!

    ReplyDelete
  4. In my experience, football coaches are the biggest control freaks who would rather have death than change their weekly routines. Brian Kelly certainly has a piece of this unfortunate death but so do the people that hired him and believe Notre Dame is somehow a football power and put all this pressure on its coaches to win NOW or else.
    Side note: Notre Dame is not a football power.

    ReplyDelete
  5. He wasn't a "kid" Czabe, he was twenty. How old do you have to be before you have to take responsibility for your own actions, or in this case, lack of action? Do you really think that this "kid" would have lost his scholarship, (if he had one) or been seriously reprimanded if he had been smart and removed himself? Sure, someone should have demanded he get down, or at least lower it half way down, but most of this is on the 20 year old grown man.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Easy. This guy had seen the movie "Rudy" about 97 times and would do anything for the ND football program. Knowing the movie as well, the coaching staff expects the students to do what ever it takes to help the program. BAN RUDY NOW!!!

    ReplyDelete
  7. In every work there should be experience person in working and they are good in higher position.. senior position advise should be needed to the other people in working.. we are Scissor Lift Rental .

    ReplyDelete