Brian Kelly (Photo Credit: Getty Images, By: Jonathan Daniel)
Reporting Dan Bernstein
By Dan Bernstein–
If Brian Kelly wants to kill another Notre Dame student, he’s gonna have to be more creative.
His preferred method – placing them high in the air on a scissor-lift during historically-dangerous windstorms — has been taken from him by school officials who don’t think Kelly will ever be capable of reading the warnings on the side of the machines.
Now, the football program will use high-tech, remote-operated cameras to film practice, with human videographers only allowed to be stationed on fixed structures.
Athletic Director Jack Swarbrick, the man who believed that 52 MPH gusts and the lowest non-hurricane barometric pressure ever recorded in the continental US could be classified as “unremarkable,” is just so excited to have a newfangled system that will bypass his coach.
“In bringing its tremendous technology expertise to the table, XOS [Digital] has worked hand in hand with our football program to form a partnership that now provides a new method of obtaining video materials that our coaches and players utilize,” he said.
In other words, there are two investigations ongoing, one by the school itself (can’t wait for those results) and one by the Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Time to look like we’re doing something before we’re finally forced to write big checks.
If the lifts themselves are the danger, why not ban their use everywhere, then? Will other ND athletic programs be trusted to use them for filming practices and games? Will the school’s maintenance staff still use them to reach things around campus that need fixing, or will they have to find new, fancy ways to reach overhead wires and pipes, or areas that need a new coat of paint?
Churches have high ceilings, you know.
There was no nationwide recall of these killer devices, since nearly everybody else in the world isn’t careless enough to use them in adverse conditions despite of clear instructions not to. Scissor-lifts are everywhere, and they rarely get blown over.
Notre Dame is a school that has embraced the responsibility of in loco parentis – Latin for “In the place of a parent.’’ It is used to describe the role a university plays when students leave home to become a part of the campus community.
In this case, Notre Dame is living up to that by parenting Brian Kelly.
The head football coach is being told “If you can’t play with your toys safely, we will take them away from you.”
No pointy, big-boy scissors for you, Brian. You use the ones with the rounded tips and the big, plastic handles.
Swarbrick can try to sell this any way he wants, blathering technical gobbledygook to hide the embarrassment and liability. He’s in this, too, however.
No celebration of space-age cameras hides the fact that he and the school’s nebulous bosses clearly don’t trust their best-known, most visible leader to keep this from happening again.
Dan Bernstein
Dan Bernstein has been the co-host of “Boers and Bernstein” since 1999. He joined the station as a reporter/anchor in 1995. The Boers and Bernstein Show airs every weekday from 1PM to 6PM on The Score, 670AM. Read more of Bernstein’s blogs here.
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