Transcends love or hate.....

That has been a fact his entire career, which means we are unlikely to have a ton of WR yards because there are a lot of screens and short passes built into the system intentionally to play to his strengths. I was concerned about his lack of touch on many short passes, which may in fact be regression but let’s give it a few games before we declare it. He didn’t have a great game, but he played well enough, it was the first game of a strange season with less prep time than normal, and we stuck with the run even when it wasn’t going great, which all of you want.

Mayer and Kyren looked great, Wilkins came out of nowhere, and Book is who we thought he is. Can someone not point out the positives and accept the known short comings, without being called a Kelly-excuses?

And the OP took the legitimate question and turned it into a why-Kelly-and-Jack-are-awful post. Legitimate questions are fine, but when they’re posed simply to give another reason to bash the ND football administration, it just sucks all the joy out of it.

“Joe Wilkins came out of nowhere.”

If catching 4 passes against Duke for 44 yards (3 of which were against a prevent D in the last minute of the first half) by the WR who did not beat out McKinley and Skowronek, is something that should excite people...

Why do so many people act like Brian Kelly is trying to coach a team Yahoo autodrafted for him?

when they transferred. Why? Because he believes that Book is better than those quarterbacks.

It's just that Kelly has so much of his precious system drilled into Book's head that he wouldn't want to start all over again with somebody else, even those with superior talent like the three you mention.