Things That We Think And Do Not Say






Hey, remember when we all thought it was sort of cool when Tom Cruise, as Jerry Maguire, wore a Notre Dame shirt while writing his little come-to-Jesus essay?

Yeah. It's pretty fuzzy to me too.

I'm writing this as the game is going on. ND just had a punt blocked. Admirably, the ND defense didn't just fold up shop and let BC score. I think ND's about to get the ball again. Way to go ND defense. Nobody would blame you if you held the ND offense down in their beds tonight and beat them with bars of soap in tube socks.

Seriously, nobody would blame you. Or convict you. Just remember that.

Tate just had a big punt return. No matter what, I'm still going to be angry, so let's just continue. These are all things I've been thinking for a while, and I'm just gonna let them spill out all over the screen here. I'm just too sick of the miserable state of Notre Dame football to hold them back any longer.

  • Charlie Weis is a geek. I like Charlie. I really do. And I'm not going to sit here and write about how he should be fired. But here's the thing, everyone is convinced that he's trying to make things too clever, and that's the reason the Irish do a lot of things with mediocrity rather than a few things really well. But I think his biggest flaw is that he's simply a geek.
    See, when he came to ND, and he started to talk a lot, so many people took it as either arrogance or over-confidence, but I took it as awkwardness. Some people get nervous and awkward feeling, and they clam up. I think Weis just starts talking. A lot. And I do think he's quite confident in his play-calling abilities, but that's not really relevant here. The problem with him being a geek is that when the question is one not of Xs and Os, but of hearts and minds, Weis has no answer. Those answers live in the realm of people skills, and geeks don't visit that land or feel comfortable there. I know. I'm a geek. I can spot my own in any crowd. And when Weis has no answer, he goes back to asking his mentors questions, but I have a feeling few of those questions have to do with inspiration.
    I've given kudos to Weis for trying to get closer to his players in the off-season. That was a good thing, and I think his players like him, but I don't get the sense that he has any idea how to inspire them. And no, I don't mean he needs to personally inspire them with Lou-Holtz-like speeches. Part of building a team is putting players on your team who can do the job for you, and frankly, particularly on offense, the Irish haven't had a guy like that since Quinn left.
    Weis is one of us. He's an alum, and he's an alum who, when he was a student at ND, thought he could coach the program better than the current guy. He's exactly like one of us. The only difference is Weis actually went out and made an attempt at doing just that while the rest of us just kept grumbling that even we could do better (and continue to do so today). I think that's amazing, and it's why I root for him. It's why I have hoped that he would be a success. But this season has been a failure, and no matter if ND retains Weis after this season or not, this season will be looked upon as a failure. Should ND win out, this season is still a failure. He may stay at ND and win many games in the future, perhaps even a NC, but this season is a failure.
  • Not even the sum of their parts: There are just way, way too many names on the Irish roster this season for whom coaches across the country would bribe, maim, and kill for the Irish to play like this. And these names aren't even performing at a level equal to the sum of their individual abilities. Good teams do that. Great teams play beyond that level. Great teams attain that synergy on the football field. Good teams make you wish they could attain greatness. Notre Dame isn't even doing that, and there's just no excuse for it. Tate, Floyd, Young, Wenger, Clausen, Aldridge, Hughes, Allen, Rudolph, Wenger... That's just on offense, and if you saw those names on another team's roster and you followed recruiting even a little bit, you'd think, "holy crap, what a monster that offense must be." Instead we're left to wondering why the offense, particularly in the running game, looks so monstrously bad so often.
  • No excuses: There are going to be a lot of pieces written in the next 24 hours about how ND isn't good enough to overcome so many turnovers. But this game doesn't reflect that. This game, and the 4 (and probably more by the time I hit 'publish') turnovers, are simply symptoms of the poor state of Notre Dame football. There are no excuses for this play, just a reason, and that reason is they just aren't a good football team.
  • Don't learn to win, learn to compete: I've been cringing a lot this week every time I read the quote from Weis about how ND will start winning on a more consistent basis once they start winning some close games. That one just killed me, and more than anything confirmed for me that Weis doesn't understand what's going on with these kids. These kids, with the names atop so many recruiting boards in the last couple of years, know plenty about winning. They won all through High School. Hell, Clausen had never lost in the state of California. But what so many of these kids never understood was how to compete. Too many of them were on teams that blew away the "competition" of lower quality programs in high school. Too many of them were able to "beat their man," simply by virtue of having talent that might play on Sundays while "their man," might, if he's luckly, have talent enough to become a pretty good engineer or history teacher. Weis has been, I think, hoping they'll learn how to win while they should have been learning about how to beat the man across from them.
  • Learning on the job: The one thing I've always hated to be reminded of this season is the number of coaches who are learning on the job. Weis is a first-time HC. Corwin Brown is a first time DC. Powlus a first time QB coach. Polian a first time whatever he is. Tenuta a first-time vaguely labeled coach. John Latina, the offensive line coach, is the most experienced coach on the staff within his current job description. How's the offensive line looking tonight?
  • What's HE doing on the field? Remember how I was talking about all those names on the ND roster for whom other coaches would kill? Well there sure seem to be a lot of players on the field for the Irish in starting positions who don't fall under that umbrella despite playing ahead of guys who do. Which makes me ask, at least once a quarter, "why is he still on the field!?" How many times do the Irish need to see a 3rd and 10 get converted on a crossing route or a sweep left before they decide to bench a guy? How many missed tackles does a started get before he's not a starter? Sometimes I wonder about these things, and then I realize that maybe I should thank Weis for assembling his roster like this because I'm absolutely sure I don't want the dirty pictures of him to show up on the internet. So thanks, Coach Weis, for keeping these players happy so that they don't start dirtypicsofweis.blogspot.com.

My wife, who is far too smart, handed my kid to me as soon as the game was over and went to bed. So I was left to smile and laugh with my kid for 2 hours last night rather than finish this off. Smart. I ended up going to bed exhausted and happy rather than full of adrenaline and angry. This morning I'm still happy, but I still feel the same way I did last night about the game too. So I'll just throw one more bullet point in here and be done with it.

  • A statue has never been erected for a critic: Notre Dame is supposed to stand for excellence in all facets of life, and as an alum, I find my being critical of the underperformance of the football program massively hypocritical. I left my small town in South Carolina more than a decade ago to attend the University of Notre Dame with great expectations for myself. Somehow, despite myself, I graduated. And now, almost 8 years later, I think it's fair to say that anyone who knew me in high school would wonder what the hell went wrong. Don't get me wrong, I've done fine. I just haven't exceeded or even met my own expectations. Notre Dame football's own spectacular and dumbfounding mediocrity in the last 10 years has been matched by my own, and it's unfair of me to be critical of one representative of the university if I can't say that I myself do Notre Dame proud. Essentially, I have stopped doing anything with excellence, so how can I expect excellence from others?
    That ends today. And perhaps this resolution will be like so many others I've made on so many January firsts, but I'm going to go and try to do whatever it is I do with excellence. That includes this blog. I'm going to post much less often, but hopefully when I do post, it will be much more worthwhile than it has been. By not posting just for the sake of posting, hopefully I'll find more time and energy to set out and pursue some new goals for myself.
    I've got to go now and figure out what expectations I'd like to exceed.
    Go Irish.
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