The debate is finished.
Understand that this, Notre Dame Football, is important to real life - my real life, anyway. I was raised by iconoclasts to be an iconoclast. I could hardly manage to complete readings of Beowulf due to all of the eye rolling. I met my first screening of Hoosiers with smirks. One of my personal favorite insults is “hero-maker.” But Notre Dame withstood my proclivities. Notre Dame, despite all the rot and fear in this world, has overcome my own inclinations toward skepticism, and the most public facing element of Notre Dame, for better or worse, is the football program. You cannot believe in Notre Dame and all it stands for while accepting a mediocre football program. It’s not that all other elements of Notre Dame should take a back seat to the performance of the football program. It’s that the football program must seek excellence with the same urgency as all other elements of Notre Dame. Back when Ty Willingham, Kevin White, and Monk Malloy were doing their best to kill off the football program, many argued that it was akin to eliminating one of the pillars of Notre Dame. Really, a mediocre football program is more akin to a massive crack in the foundation of the institution. And so we must demand better. We must demand excellence. We must demand that the program be lead by those who are capable of excellence. Charlie Weis does not meet that criteria.
I will not vilify Charlie Weis. He’s a fellow Notre Dame alum. He probably works as hard as any other head coach in the nation. And, frankly, I kind of like the guy. So if you’re here to read about how awful a person Charlie Weis happens to be, or how I can’t stand his arrogance, or my recount of various Charlie Weis quotations that look so naive in hindsight, then you’ll be disappointed. I’ll leave that sort of thing to the cognitively weak among us while they pock sentences with all-caps words and multiple question marks. It doesn’t serve any purpose. Charlie Weis’ own record says all that needs to be said. Weis’ loss to a 2-8 Syracuse and a fired coach with a career .200 winning record was simply the gratuitous exclamation mark on a simple premise: Charlie Weis is not a good enough college football coach to head the Notre Dame football program.
Regular readers of HLS already know that I’m pretty bummed right now, and not just because Notre Dame lost to the hapless Orange. I’m bummed because I really wanted Weis to succeed. Never before - and hopefully never again - have I found a head coach of Notre Dame so relatable, and so my faith and hope in Weis was really built upon that probably unavoidable belief that, given the right set of circumstances and all the right breaks, I too could have been the head coach of Notre Dame one day. Charlie Weis is the manifestation of daydreams that most of “us” have all the time. The problem is that the daydreams become a nightmare when applied to the real world. The results we’ve gotten with Weis at the helm of the Irish aren’t all that different than what we’d get if you or I were in Weis’ position, and that’s just not good enough.
Notre Dame’s goal is not to be “great” someday. Notre Dame’s goal, every year, reasonable or not, is to win a National Championship. And in today’s landscape, given the realpolitik of college football, nothing but a perfect, undefeated season will suffice to garner the Irish that achievement. The Irish will not get a 1-loss national championship like certain SEC teams. And so the Irish can’t have that hard-to-explain loss on their resume. Today’s loss to Syracuse is similar to hard-to-explain losses Weis has suffered every season he’s been in charge - even in his “good” seasons. It’s time to eliminate those hard-to-explain losses, and unfortunately Weis is all out of answers.
Admirably, Weis painted himself in a corner with his biggest success since taking the job at Notre Dame: recruiting. Right up to the day Weis was introduced as Head Coach of Football at Notre Dame, pundits tried to dismiss the Irish as has-beens simply by virtue of the “fact” that the Irish couldn’t put together top-flight recruiting classes. Weis, despite all of his faults on the field, has shut those pundits up. So much so that today a loss to a 2-8 Syracuse with a roster of guys that Notre Dame probably wouldn’t have even bothered to recruit is simply inexcusable. Thanks to Weis, the Notre Dame job is far more attractive than it ever was after Davie or Willingham. Any competent potential replacement will be able to see that not only can Notre Dame compete in recruiting, they can outright dominate recruiting, particularly if they succeed on the field of play as well. Any competent observer can already see that Notre Dame is far too talented to be playing as they do.
Any time I see the movie Crimson Tide on the television, I’ll stop and watch. Not only is it a great film because of the acting (nobody plays Gene Hackman better than Gene Hackman, and only four or five people can pull off a good Denzel Washington), but the moral of the story is equal parts troubling and fascinating. Despite all the work and all the best efforts of extremely smart, disciplined people, things can still go horribly wrong. I believe that’s what’s happened with Weis at Notre Dame. I believe he’s really as smart as so many people accuse him of believing himself to be. I know for a fact that he works harder than most. I believe he loves his alma mater. I don’t doubt that he’s given this job his best shot. And I know that it’s all gone awry. Sometimes the best intentions coupled with the best efforts still fail. That doesn’t mean that the goals are unachievable by anyone. It just means the goals are unachievable by those currently undertaking them. When that happens, questions must be asked, and assessments must be done. Changes must be made. Otherwise you run the risk of stagnating and dying while standing still.
The devil we know is not better than the devil we don’t. There is little evidence to cause belief that the Notre Dame administration will succeed in “hitting a home run” with another coaching search and hiring process, but there’s also little evidence to indicate that any result of such a process would result in worse than what we already have. As stated before, Weis has already done the university a tremendous service in making the job more attractive than it was when he arrived on campus. If nothing else, even a moderately capable athletic department and school administration would succeed in attracting a coach who has a track record of doing “more with less” at another program. That said, the goal should be to hit that home run. No name should fail consideration unless that name has too much moral ambiguity attached. Today’s best collegiate coaches read as a list of who-wasn’ts-back-when. Pete Carrol got the job at Southern Cal largely because nobody else wanted it and he happened to not be doing anything at the time. Bob Stoops had no track record of success as a HC because he was a coordinator at Florida when he was hired. But these coaching success stories were only struck upon because the programs were willing to make changes. Notre Dame must continue the search for their own success and then guard that success jealously.
As Lou Holtz has stated this evening, there is no reason Notre Dame cannot compete for a national championship. Even accepting that “parity” in college football is here to stay, the university holds many advantages over almost every other program in the country. Particularly if parity really does exist, then no other program will ever be able to garner a history or tradition to rival Notre Dame. Notre Dame already gained these advantages before many programs even became “serious” about football. And while the current landscape may present a greater challenge to winning a national championship than in eras past, it is that history and that tradition of Notre Dame that should make this institution relish meeting and beating these greater challenges.
Fear of attrition by ND’s student-athletes should not even enter into the equation when deciding upon a coaching change. ND’s student-athletes, unlike at many programs, actually are a real part of the student body, and as such have more at stake than their “football lives.” Once we all stop looking a the worst-case scenario, we realize that while some on the current roster may decide that the new coaching regime doesn’t meet their particular tastes, simply keeping the current regime and allowing all that talent on the roster to continue to flounder serves as a bigger threat to the long-term health of the program.
You cannot lose to a 2-8 Syracuse as 20 point home favorites and be a success at Notre Dame. You cannot lose more games in 2 seasons than any other Notre Dame team in history. You cannot lose 3 games in which you held double-digit leads, no matter the youth of your depth chart. You cannot gain just 41 yards on the 108th ranked rushing defense in the country while giving up 12 tackles to Arthur Jones, a defensive tackle with only 39 tackles on the season, and hope to retain the faith of the faithful. You cannot try to answer big-picture questions with minutiae. The evidence has mounted and the scales have been tipped.
Last weekend, Kirk Herbstreit paid Notre Dame perhaps the ultimate insult when he rhetorically asked, “what’s the big deal” in reference to the Irish’s struggles. He pointed out that over the last decade or so, Notre Dame averaged only 7 wins per season, and so Irish fans should not be “frustrated” by “more of the same.” It’s not surprising that such a loser-mentality should be the sentiment held by an outsider, but I fear that such sentiment may leak into the Notre Dame fanbase as well. Previous failures are no reason to accept future failures. Previous failures exist only to motivate future success. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. But for God’s sake, try something new.
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