• The powers that be in CFB are big old wussies. WUSSIES I SAY. Suck it up coaches! Not revealing your ballots is just….weak. #

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I bought a grill this week, and while God didn’t bless be by allowing me to win 232 million dollars (a challenge I made all that much more difficult for God by not buying a ticket – free will for the win!(?)), he did give me the weather today, and his work will be honored by the consumption of jerk chicken and tequila lime corn on the cob. Kick. Ass.

The Roundup:

• Hey, look, Dr. Saturday just made the point that ND’s best chance in a while to defeate SoCal (on paper) doesn’t look so good (on paper).
• Come to think of it, this might be the first time in Dantonio’s tenure at MSU where he’s had to search for leadership.
• We had to duct-tape our fingers together from making really mean jokes on this blog yesterday about Lee Corso’s stroke. So we’ll just throw the story up here and hope the angel wins over the devil (both look like Porky Pig, by the way).
• Biscuit, nearly 2 years ago, picked up on the fact that Florida is the new Thug U, and ever since, at least once a month, some Florida fan from the backwaters shows up on this site and comments on that post. Most of the time our spam filter picks it up and we just throw it away. The English language and the temporal quality of blogs deserve better.
• What the hell is Mike Leach doing wearing my best Hawaiian Shirt?

Pretty slow news day. I expect things to get more interesting soon. Phil Steele hits the shelves in a little over a week. Preseason T-25s are on the way. And we’ve actually got something pretty good cooking to pass the summer days, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile. Anyone got a killer grilling recipe? Feel free to share in the comments. I’m going to cook enough meat this weekend to feed Sally Struthers.

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When Ty Willingham was fired by Notre Dame, pundits from all sorts of media outlets cried, “They aren’t honoring their contract with Willingham!” They claimed this was the first time ND didn’t honor a contract with a head football coach. They claimed ND was racist. They claimed that ND was no longer special and winning was now all that mattered at ND. They claimed a lot of things because, in more ways than one, they don’t have a clue. That, or they, being paid columnists, were just hoping that “honoring a contract” means “continuing to employ someone despite gross inability to perform their job.” They were wrong, of course. Honoring a contract simply means living up to one’s end of a bargain. Consider ND living up to theirs.

Notre Dame fired former football coach Tyrone Willingham after the 2004 regular season. Three years later, the school was still paying him.

The school paid Willingham $650,000 from July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008, the third straight year they’ve paid him that sum since his firing.

Contacts have buyouts. And when you decide you want to end the relationship defined in a contract, you have to honor the contract and live with the penalties. In this case, as with most cases involving good contracts (and good lawyers), the penalty was a buy-out clause.

I dunno. Maybe columnists just don’t have good contracts. Then again, from their employers perspectives, maybe columnists have excellent contracts.

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There’s simply no spinning this.

The final regular-season ballots in the USA TODAY Coaches’ Poll will no longer be made public beginning with the 2010 football season, according to a person with knowledge of the information who didn’t want to be identified because he wasn’t authorized to comment before an announcement today from the American Football Coaches Association.

Make no mistake about it, this was all done in order for the coaches to be as self-serving as possible. Coaches will vote for themselves first, those in their conferences second, and against anyone who might hurt their interest in any way somewhere in between.

This poll, one third of the BCS championship formula, will be made into a mockery even moreso than it already had been. It should come as no surprise that the group that made this decision is lead, by example, by one Tyrone Willingham.

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 Yeah, Edwards wasn’t a great coach (okay, he was pretty bad), but this is a good message for any player:

When you get a guy one-on-one? You gotta WEEEEE-yiiiiin.

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Alex Welch is Irish! Welcome, Alex, welcome to the Notre Dame family!  Wait, wait, you’re already part of it?  Well, okay, then…HOORAY!!!

Alex was a SHOCK of a catch if I’ve ever seen one.  This dude grew up loving and following Notre Dame football, is friends with current TE Kyle Rudolph (and of the same school), has an uncle that played at ND, has a sister that just graduated from ND, and has hair that’s as red as red hair gets:

Alex picked ND over Michigan, Ohio State and Oklahoma, among 20+ other offers.  But those guys never had a chance. 

Alex joins a tough stable of Tight Ends at ND, strengthening even further a solid crew of Rudolph, Fauria, my boy Ragone, and newly minted favorite backup guy ever recent walk-on Bobby “Dont Say I’m Sitting at Home Eating a Cheese” Burger*.

Welch is my boy – welcome to the family you already belonged to anyway, Alex!

*Due to Bemenderfer’s move to the ND Japan Alumni team.

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• @NDHFC, Do you think The Rock or Con Air was a more believable movie? I found myself stretching my imagination a bit for The Rock. #
• @TriceraPops Missed Gilmore dismissing Clausen, but overachieving underdog would be a welcome role for JC in reply to TriceraPops #
• Nobody ever says ‘Gymnasium’ anymore. I’m bringing it back. I hope the Irish really hit the gymnasium hard this summer. #
• Charlie is waiting til camp starts to name captains. Is he waiting for certain guys to fall into that role? I think he is. Certain guys = JC #

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This one is for Bad Kermit, as I know how much he loves Keanu and this movie.

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We really like that Charlie Weis is using Twitter. It gives us a fair bit of insight into what he’s doing in order to get ND back to winning football, and it’s provided the basis for one of our stupid, weekly features. And he’s managed to inform his audience without any real gaffes like, say, breaking NCAA rules about recruiting by celebrating the verbal commitment of a recruit. But today’s latest Twitter novella by Weis has sort of stuck in my craw, and so I’m going to plaster it here, explain why it’s bugging me, and then see if our fine readers can persuade me not to be bothered by it.

These comments really bug me, but I figured I’d bring them up for discussion and see if I can be persuaded that they shouldn’t bug me. My first reaction to these thoughts is that SoCal, Oklahoma, Florida and the like didn’t deal with “a few close games” in 2009. But SoCal had a couple, losing to Oregon State and barely pulling it out against Arizona and Cal. Oklahoma lost by 10 to Texas and 10 to Florida. Florida beat Oklahoma by 10 and lost by 1 to Mississippi. But I guess what really bugs me is that in the vast majority of the games played by these three teams, it never came down to winning a close game and having to make some plays to win those close games. In fact, losing to Mississippi was largely forgiven by the voters by virtue of Florida blowing the doors off everyone else. Oklahoma was really able to overcome the Texas loss partly because of their incredible scores. Everyone was lamenting that SoCal wasn’t up against Florida in the BCS championship game because, by and large, they looked absolutely dominating.

And my reading of Weis’ comments today really is built on top of years of comments by Weis that really has convinced me that Weis constantly looks at any game against any opponent as a situation wherein he and the coaching staff must “find a way to win,” rather than “find a way to blow the doors off this opponent to further our argument for the BCS championship.” Charlie Weis seems to look at the season schedule and sees a bunch of games against mostly-level competition. Carroll, Stoops, and Meyer seem to look at their schedules and see the makings of a campaign to win a vote.

Discuss.

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Now here’s something Obama has said recently that we at HLS can debate!

After giving the commencement speech at Notre Dame, Obama spoke at an Indianapolis fundraiser Sunday evening for the Democratic National Committee. He began his remarks by joking that he told university President Rev. John Jenkins that the controversy surrounding his appearance on campus “paled in comparison to what to do about the football team.”
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The football team has posted records of 3-9 and 7-6 the past two seasons, the most losses in a two-year period ever for the Fighting Irish, who haven’t won a national championship since 1988.

“That’s an issue we may not resolve within my four years,” Obama joked.

“Eight,” shouted someone from the audience.

“All right, well, maybe in eight we might get it done,” Obama said.

That would mean at least 5 more seasons before most ND fans would be happy with the performance of ND football. Oh dear. That’s, what, 2 more head coaches?

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You know, we here at HLS have been TRYING to NOT write about the DickRod.  I mean, honestly – ignoring things that deserve comment.  Really trying to resist it.

But this dude is such a complete tool, it’s unavoidable.  It can’t be helped.

Most recently, Richie has decided that Scholarship Offers Aren’t REALLY Offers.

According to Jim Stefani, Michigan has as many as 130 offers to high school prospects outstanding thus far. Many of these, however, might be from kids that they don’t really want to commit. According to Jim Stefani, “In a sense, many Michigan ‘offers’ are not really firm offers but more or less strong indications of interest by Michigan.”

Bold is mine.

Is there anything more wrong than this in CFB football recruiting?  (Other than Poodle Pete’s crew flashing cash to every 17 year old under the sun I mean).  Think about this – you’re a rising senior in high school, you get an offer from a school you’re considering, and you say “yeah, great, I accept!” and they say “well, wait, we didn’t really mean that it was a REAL offer.  let’s chat again in a couple months.”  And, what’s the freaking point?  Why call it an OFFER when it’s NOT an offer but strong interest?  Why not just say, ‘hey kid, we’re strongly interested’???  Why offer a kid you really don’t want to accept?

WTF?

The linked article by a fairly-decent UM (sucks) blog goes on to rationalize this in a few ways, but is generally pretty balanced in the analysis.   But to me, this is just typical shady-ass DickRod stuff.  Throw out a bunch of offers to gets to cover your bases, and then keep kids that aren’t at the top of their recruiting board at arm’s length if they actually want to commit.

Look Dickie, an offer is an OFFER. It means “I am offering you a scholarship to play with my widdle skunkbears” so when a kid says OK, you GIVE HIM AN F-ING SCHOLARSHIP YOU DOUCHE.   I hope the kids you do this to go off to Appalachian State and whoop your ass every year in the opener (again).

This, once again, shows you the type of guy that RichRod is.  The type of program that Michigan (sucks) has become.  The school and the fans like to pretend they’re ‘better’, but when they do shady things like this they rationalize it with ‘well, Florida and other schools do it too’.  Listen up folks, Michigan (sucks) is not some beacon of light in football.  They pretend like they are.  They wish they could be.  They are not.

They aren’t and can’t be ND.

Other UM (suckity sucks!) notes:

DickRod is about to lose 2 more players.  Kevin Grady (let’s get driz-unnnnnk!) got busted for violating every single term of his probation and should be booted.  And Kurt Wermers, a backup guard, is bailing as well.

And then there’s this gem of a quote, with Dickie trying to make it seem like he’s asking guys to leave because they’re not doing the things they need to do to stay, when really he just knows these kids are seeing the writing on the wall. (The writing on that wall reads “this Head Coach is a d-bag and this program is in shambles so I need to get the F out while I still can”):

“Stay tuned. There’s a couple guys I’m gonna sit with here. Just guys that maybe if they’re not doing all their responsibilities and doing what they need to do to be part of our football program may not be back. I hope that’s not too many.”

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I caught The Rock on TV this weekend, and it got me debating with myself over the believability of Nic Cage as FBI Anti-bio-weapons expert/scientist and Nic Cage as sorta-mindless-but-well-trained-special-forces-ex-con. And I have to say, I’m finding the idea that Nic Cage could be a well conditioned, well trained soldier who made one poor decision much more believable than the idea that Nic Cage could get a PhD in bio sciences. But I decided to see how Coach Weis felt, and asked…

We’ll let you know his response just as soon as he responds!

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Jon Gruden has found something to do while he waits to take his .540 HC winning percentage to another football program (probably) in 2010.

ESPN is making a big change in its Monday Night Football announcing booth.

Former Bucs coach Jon Gruden is in, while Tony Kornheiser is resigning, according to ESPN, after three seasons.

Play-by-play man Mike Tirico and analyst Ron Jaworski are staying in the booth.

We’re pointing this out because he’s still a “marquee name” that gets thrown about quite often when people begin asking, “If not Charlie Weis, then who?” And yes, we’re well aware that the guy won a superbowl against a team that was probably only in the superbowl because they’d been coached by him the previous year. We’re also aware that his offensive playbook is not only massive, but also nebulous and full of white-out, pen ink, and whatever markings were made by whatever he could find whenever a new idea struck him. At times, this includes the blood of hapless QBs who couldn’t defend themselves against Gruden.

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• Just discovered people have been conversing with us on Twitter and we were left unawares. Sorry. Will try to be more conversive. #
• My Calendar notes all Canadian holidays, and I can’t help but notice there’s no Canadian Mother’s Day. #
• Ty Willie hired as assistant water boy ina startup ‘pro’ football league. Not surprising. #
• Man Saunders can barely read the teleprompter. #
• Espn picks ND as better than Michigan this season. Did they really think itd be an interesting debate? #
• I’m not the only one who sees Lost as an obvious metaphor for CFB Recruiting, right? And Urban Meyer is Easu, of course. #

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There’s this absolutely, astoundingly fantastic series of novels called “The Baroque Cycle,” by Neal Stephenson which would have been better named as the 3rd book in the series actually is named: “The System of the World.” And while the story is about many things, more than anything else it all conspires to make the reader realize that everyone has their own motivations (cough*almostalwaysmoney*cough*butalsosometimesirrationalemotion*cough) to make a big fuss over their own priorities, and the people who find their way to real power are the people who learn to take advantage of humanity’s inability to come together, cooperate, and actually focus our efforts on a small set of priorities that could actually make life better for all people.

• More info about Mark Herzlich’s fight against Ewings Sarcoma.
• Looks like someone can already see Kiffen staring down the JuCo cookie jar, and they’re yelling, “No! No! No! No!“
• A Michigan (sucks!) RB was arrested for… failing to live up to his probation agreements made for whatever he’d been arrested for before.
• Yeah, we’d forgotten the whole Paulus to play a year of Football story too, but Nunes didn’t.
• Oh, Nunes talked to the new SU HC too. That’s right, a blogger interviewed a real HC.
• The Coaches want to become less transparent, and BGS sees right through it.
• Some thoughts on what Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t know about football, or basketball, or, really, probably sports in general.
• John Elway says he’s ok with his son quitting the game of football. No doubt Thanksgiving this year at the Elway house will seem a little weird.
• Yeah, UCLA Fans are enjoying the SoCal scandal.

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