PITTSBURGH — It’s over. There is nothing left. Charlie Weis is done at Notre Dame.
He goes down as the biggest, most colossal failure ever. Worse than Tyrone Willingham by far. Never has anyone been blown up to such proportions, at Notre Dame of all places, and then done so little. The whole thing was just hot air.
Notre Dame lost to Pitt 27-22 Saturday, and no, Weis’ firing is not official yet. Sources aren’t saying he’s done.
But he is. The players don’t believe in him anymore. He doesn’t motivate them. They don’t buy his schemes. They don’t care about his Super Bowl rings.
He has nothing left. It’s over.
It’s funny how the feel of things changed Saturday night. We’ve watched Weis these past few years, starting with him telling his players they would have a decided `”schematic advantage” over everyone in the country. Inexplicably, Notre Dame’s power brokers, replaced his contract with a big, a 10-year deal before he had done anything.
And Jimmy Clausen came in as the spiky-haired quarterback, a high school kid arriving at the College Football Hall of Fame in a Hummer with a police escort to announce that he would play for the Irish.
Oh, the national titles that were on the way.
What a scam.
These five years under Weis should go down as a study of something seriously wrong in our sports culture. This was more than people wanting to have hope. It was a cult following, and it was so flawed from the start.
Two years ago, I wrote that Weis was the world’s highest-paid intern and started calling him that. The point was that Weis was making every single mistake a first-year head coach could make, learning by error in front of Touchdown Jesus.
Also, with a background in the pros, he didn’t realize that college coaching isn’t about schemes but about player development. Weis’ players, with few exceptions, don’t develop. And in college, you can’t just kick them out and buy better ones.
In September, a former Notre Dame player placed a billboard in South Bend wishing Weis luck in the fifth year of his internship. So the tension was building from the start, racial tension at first, after Willingham, who seemed to be on the path to failure, was dumped without being given a fair chance.
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Notre Dame had one black head coach in any sport in its history. And guess which football coach was the first one in recent times to be fired without having a chance to complete his first contract.
Willingham seemed headed for failure. Still, that never looked good at an athletic department with such a shaky history in minority hiring. And then Weis came in and wowed everyone somehow.
Weis and Willingham, by the way, have the same winning percentages at Notre Dame.
And Weis is playing a watered-down schedule.
That’s going to be the first part of this ugly chapter in Notre Dame football history. But from there, Weis’ brashness led to more and more tension, more anger and arguments.
On …
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