[Trevor Barnes]

Start doing the math here folks if we let this drag on longer...

With the College Football regular season ending soon for most teams, most of the vacancies in major programs will be filled shortly. Iowa State is just days away from being one of the early programs to get a new Head Coach named before the Bowl Season begins. Who has been pegged to take over after 12 years under Dan McCarney, read on for the latest news…

According to sources, Brian Kelly, Head Coach at Central Michigan, has been in negotiations with Iowa State over the past week. While Kelly has gone pretty much under the radar compared to some of the higher-profile names, he has been debated a lot as a candidate with a strong resume of rebuilding programs and overachieving.

From what sources have said, and if they are correct, I would expect an announcement sometime next week introducing Kelly as the next Head Coach. Kelly will apparently coach the Chippewas today and in the MAC Championship game on the 30th before stepping aside for an interim coach to take over the Bowl-Game duties on the sidelines. While sources could be wrong, I personally feel comfortable with the information but I understand that we can only know what they tell us and sometimes thats what the people with power want them to tell us.

I’m told that ISU entered the search having deciding on a maximum of $1.75million/year for the perfect coach if it came to bidding. From all indications, the new contract will be for far less but it will be competitive enough to keep Kelly around for a while and to ensure he can feel comfortable that he’ll be provided enough time to get things going for the Cyclones. Other schools that showed a lot of interest in Kelly over the past few weeks include Michigan State and Miami, to a certain degree. Some sources are saying that Kelly is a finalist for the MSU job so it will be interesting to see how things progress.

Kelly, a native of Chelsea, Mass., has been the Head Coach at Central Michigan for the past three years and coached at Grand Valley State (Div II) for thirteen years that included two DII National Championships. Kelly entered the season with a career record of 128-47-2.

With an impressive resume and apparently great talent for building relationships with players, one would assume Kelly would fit in great in Ames, IA. While he’s not extremely vocal or flashy, he gets the job done time and time again with what a lot have considered to be lesser talent and opportunities.

Having coached his team against the likes of Michigan, Kelly should have no problem adjusting to the Big XII Conference and the teams he’ll face every week. Kelly might not be the PR salesman that DMac was but he has a great resume, a big-time desire to succeed and he understands what it takes to be successful with the cards stacked against him.

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