Which means he's not on the Swinney/Saban elite list. (I'm close to adding Day to that list.)

The discussion of "close to a national championship" is a tough to consider because it's a sliding scale. Let's play a silly hypothetical game about 2012. Let's say that instead of losing to Baylor, Kansas State had won that game. Let's say that they went on to beat Texas and finished the season ranked #1 and Notre Dame finished ranked #2. I think we would have crushed Kansas State, but let's assume we hung close and lost a close one. Would that change your opinion of Kelly? It wouldn't change mine.

Smart has a great recruiting record - a couple months ago, I looked up recruiting rankings over the past several years and if memory serves correctly, Alabama was the only team better than Georgia. So I think he deserves credit for that, as it is probably the single biggest determinant of success in college football. But I don't think Smart should get bonus points for staying close in a game with fairly even talent - I feel like that's the bare minimum a decent coach should be able to do.

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.

But he's firmly without debate on the "above Kelly" list.

But I haven't been all that impressed with Smart's game plans/performances in a number of games I've seen him coach.

If he came to ND, I doubt he would bring in the same level of talent he has landed at Georgia; this opinion may well be incorrect, as there are a number of advantages to recruiting at ND when the coach actually works at it, but that is the feeling I get.

I see his model as similar to Pete Carroll's - bring in great players and build a program that gets them to compete like crazy. When done well, it can produce outstanding results. But don't forget that Pete Carroll lost a national championship at thw end of 2005 with 10 all Americans because he couldn't figure out a way to slow down Vince Young and he later threw away a Super Bowl with one of the dumbest play calls of all time.

Is not evidence to put Smart on Kelly’s level....as much as I hate the man with my entire soul...if Pete were coaching NCAA right now he’s be with Sabin/Swinney and again clearly above Kelly.

I think you want to have a different discussion - about Smart solely as a game day coach. That would be a different list than one for college head coaches. Because a college head coach is a game day coach, a talent developer, a talent identifier, a recruiter, a staff manager, a program manager, and a fundraiser/publicist. The end result is reflected in the health and success of the college football team. Kelly is not on Smart’s level as a NCAA D1 major program head coach.

As I noted above, I agree that recruiting is the single biggest predictor of a team's success, so coaches who focus on it are doing something smart. But the strategy and game day aspects are also very important.

I used Carroll as an example because his model of recruiting success and mind blowing strategery failures would be familiar to most of us. But there are a lot of coaches who are recruit well and then fail to put those players in a position to win or at least underperform the level of talent they have on hand. So I think when we are evaluating coaches on overall performance, we need to be careful not to overrate their overall ability based on a wilingness/ability to recruit over a relatively short window.