Despite a 4-8 season in 2016, Brian Kelly is returning for an 8th year as the Notre Dame football coach this fall. That decision left many fans unhappy but the opinion that matters most is the one of Kelly's boss, Jack Swarbrick. This week, NewsCenter 16 Sports Director Angelo Di Carlo sat down with Swarbrick to discuss a number of topics, including an in depth look at the state of the football program. Swarbrick explained what went wrong in 2016, why Brian Kelly is returning in 2017 and why the steps Notre Dame made in the off-season are signs that this isn't a one year trial run for Kelly this upcoming season.

Angelo: Two years ago was a great year, you made it to a major bowl game, 10-3 overall record and then last year happened, 4-8. What did happen and how disappointing was last season?

Jack: I think the success of the 10-3 season and the failure of the 4-8 season are more closely linked than might be apparent. By that I mean, we could see some of the challenges the previous year but when you go 10-3 it's a little harder to address them. And so if I look back on those two years, I blame myself for not prompting more change after the 10-3 season. Instead we didn't, it built up and it caught us last year in dramatic fashion.

Angelo: What were some of those things?

Jack: I think it was the things Brian has already recited about the input that he got from the players at the end of the year. One was accountability and competitiveness within the program, that it had slipped in everything we did. Great programs compete from the morning until night, in the weight room, in the classroom on the practice field. We'd lost a little of that

Two other things, one which was our approach to player development, we needed to retool it. That's where college sports has such a critical dynamic as opposed to pro sports, there's so much player development that goes on in college and we had fallen behind. The last one was, the students that are on our football team are remarkable young men that need really good teachers because they want a lot. They demand a lot and we need to make sure we have the best teachers we could find.

Angelo: When I sat down with Coach Kelly last August he cited a rising young defense and two great quarterbacks as reasons why he believed this team could've went to the College Football Playoff. How big of a miscalculation was that?

Jack: I think the quarterbacks were very good, I would say all three quarterbacks were very good. You can't account for some of the things that happen in the course of the year but I think the quarterback play was a strength, not a miscalculation. Defensively it didn't come together. I know there's a lot of focus with that on scheme and for me it was more about implementation and teaching than it was scheme and so we had to learn to do that better.

Angelo: Why is Kelly still your head football coach?

Jack: Because he's got a quarter century track record which proves he's a very good coach. You're not a good coach for 25 years and then not a good coach and he has consistently been a great coach. He fits well with this place and I think right at the top of the list for me is that he has a willingness to always look at the program and how to make it better. You face a challenge coming off of a year like last year and a coach says 'everything is okay, it was just a bad year.' What you want is a coach who says 'we're going to look at everything because that's not acceptable,' and that's exactly what Brian did.

Angelo: What's he changed about himself in this last several months that gives you a very positive outlook of where things can go from here.

Jack: I think the thing that---and Brian has talked about it publicly--that has been very significant for us has been the reallocation of his own time. When I hired Brian, the first thing he focused on in the interview was the importance of managing the students time to ensure their success. He laid out a bunch of ways that he was going to doing it differently than we had done it at Notre Dame. All ways that which would make the days more efficient for our students and allow them to have more success. He needed to do the same thing for himself and he has.

We needed to build a staff that allows him to oversee the entire program and make himself available across the board. Over time, he's been pulled back to narrower parts of the program and it hurt his ability to see the whole thing. The way we built the staff, the way he's approaching it, he's very much more engaged across the board and including with our students.

Angelo: You mentioned in your podcast back in December, looking things over--over a two year period, citing the great 2015 season you had. Obviously 2016 was not what you guys wanted. Is it fair to say you need to see significant improvements in 2017 for Brian Kelly to return in 2018?

Jack: We are always looking to improve but we didn't rebuild the assets of the program we rebuilt think we were engaging in a one year re-tooling. We've gone long in our approach to attract the talent we attracted in Mike, Clark, Chip and Del and our strength and conditioning staff, you aren't getting people like that if they think they are engaged in a one game experiment. Everybody in this program expects to be better this year. Everybody in this program is looking for progress and improvement. We aren't going into this holding our breathe saying "oh my gosh, how did the first game go?" or "how did the 2nd game go?" We're very comfortable that this team will be better this year.