Until Tuesday, Brian Kelly hadn't spoken to reporters since the night of the national title game.
In the time between, he interviewed with the NFL's Philadelphia Eagles, intimating that leaving Notre Dame, in fact, was "an option."
And then there was that whole matter of the death of his star linebacker's girlfriend who never really died because she never actually existed at all.
Eight days away from National Signing Day, Brian Kelly has been criss-crossing the country, recruiting hard.
Certainly, he's had a thing or two to talk about at those dinner tables.
"The recruits, I tell them up front that I'm committed to Notre Dame," Kelly said in a conference call. "Flattered that the NFL would want me to be one of their coaches. But it's just not what I want to do. I want to be a college football coach."
Kelly affirmed that to his college football team Sunday night in a meeting on campus.
"That I'm committed to them, and I'm committed to Notre Dame," Kelly said. "I think from their perspective, they just wanted to know that I'm going to be their coach, and be their coach for some time.
"College is all that I've been involved in. I really didn't understand the NFL process, the game, who is involved in the day-to-day operations of selecting the team, all of those things.
"Quite frankly, I wanted to answer those so I wouldn't have to go through this again. Because we're going to win again next year, and there are probably going to be teams that have an interest in coaching in the NFL, and I want to be able to tell them definitively that I want to coach in college.
"I think the intrigue was more just finding out about it so it's now easy for me to say no."
But that wasn't the only consideration for Kelly in the weeks following the title game. The controversy swirling around Manti Te'o was something Kelly knew was coming ever since Te'o called him the day after Christmas.
"It sounded just so crazy that the first thing I wanted to do is make sure that we got the right people on top of this immediately," Kelly said. "That was really my first thought -- Let's find out what the heck's going on here. Because you get a phone call in the middle of the night, and the first thing is this young lady is not in fact dead, you don't know what to think."
As for whether he thinks it affected how Te'o played?
"Hindsight is 20/20," Kelly said. "I didn't think going into the game that he was affected by it, but he didn't play his best. Alabama had something to do with that as well, clearly. I really don't know. That's a lot of weight on the shoulders of somebody. I think we could make a leap that maybe it did, but I think Manti would know for sure.
"Manti will be remembered as a great leader on our football team, on an undefeated football team at Notre Dame," Kelly said. "For me, he'll be in my eyes one of the very great teammates that I've ever had in 22 years of coaching."
Kelly said he and athletic director Jack Swarbrick are still working through the process of a contract extension, and it might still be months away.
