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But Smart's closeness doesn't require a hypothetical. by IrishJosh24

Smart was actually a few minutes away from winning a championship and leading Bama from start to finish. In real life. Not hypothetically. He didn't close the deal, but it was far closer than anything Brian Kelly has ever accomplished.

The fact that you must resort to a multilevel hypothetical - if Kansas State had won game X, and then gone on to win game Y, and then we played Kansas State and had result Z, then what would you think? - sort of demonstrates the point.

And, no, losing a close game to Kansas State in 2012 wouldn't have changed my mind on Kelly. Not because of closeness to a title in that event (if he'd won that hypothetical game, he'd have won the hypothetical championship, and a narrow loss would have been his closest result), but largely because it was Kansas State and not Bama or Clemson. Let's put it this way: Kansas State is highly unlikely to advance to a championship game through the playoffs. It is unlikely that they were fourth best team that year even before the bowl season. I'm fairly confident they finished the pre-bowl season ranked outside the top five, and ultimately finished outside of the top ten.

Your hypothetical would involve probably one of the worst teams in a championship game in the past decade. It's not a great measure of Brian Kelly's success or likelihood to win a title, even as a hypothetical. How about this one instead: Can you envision Brian Kelly ending a season defeating any team that actually made the title game in the past ten years? So, this would include Bama (2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020), LSU (2011, 2019), Auburn (2013), Florida State (2013), Ohio State (2014, 2020), Oregon (2014), Clemson (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019), Georgia (2017). I don't think he would have won a year-end matchup against any of those teams. I don't even think it would have been competitive, ever.

In addition, there is a ton of other evidence about Brian Kelly's performance. A close loss in that one (hypothetical) game wouldn't erase all the other data. Relatedly, Kirby Smart has other data to suggest that he can win some of these games (beating us, Auburn, and Oklahoma in 2017, as well as leading Bama in the championship game for all but about four minutes; beating Florida in 2018, as well as leading most of the game, again, against Bama in the SEC Title Game; and beating us, Florida, and Baylor in 2019; no real credit for beating Cincinnati this year, but that might just be my own bias).

I'm not sure I even understand the idea about staying close in a game with fairly even talent. I'm not sure that Georgia team was evenly talented with Bama, or that almost any college team is. But it's also not like Smart was just gifted his roster. He recruited that team. It's on the head coach to do that, and he's done really well. It's not that Kirby Smart is the perfect coach, necessarily, but, on balance, it's not hard to conclude that he's a better coach than Brian Kelly.