Just days after saying leaving Notre Dame “isn’t an option” and he had “the best job in the country,” reports have emerged linking Brian Kelly to the Philadelphia Eagles. He purportedly interviewed for the job, despite being out of the country. Time for Notre Dame fans to freak out? Perhaps, though as Keith Arnold points out, it may be significant that Brian Kelly shares an agent with both Schefter and Mortensen.

Maybe Kelly wants to leave Notre Dame for the NFL, though, if he was serious, doing the media equivalent of shouting it with a bullhorn would seem silly. Kelly has earned the reputation as “a climber.” Most coaches, though, would “climb” from Grand Valley State to D-IA with Central Michigan, from Central Michigan to Cincinnati and from Cincinnati to Notre Dame. With the money in college football, would a more fleeting engagement with the Philadelphia Eagles even be a climb?

This stinks of a ploy, one designed to give Notre Dame a little taste of terror and reassert whatever leverage was lost by the title game beat down. If Kelly leaves now, the program instantly returns to full-on panic mode, a place it knows well from the past two decades.

This is a different regime in South Bend, though even a whiff of NFL interest got his predecessor Charlie Weis a 10-year contract and, now, Notre Dame has far more to lose.

[Photo via USA Today Sports]