On Facebook yesterday, one of my law-school classmates made an observation about Charlie Weis’s then-imminent departure that I suspect will be heard in certain corners the sports media this week, as Weis’s firing is used to advance the evergreen storyline of Notre Dame’s fall from grace. (The only story the sports media likes better than “Notre Dame’s fall from grace” is, of course, “Notre Dame’s return to glory.”) The observation is:
What coach would want to come to ND, considering that the moment they walk in the door, there’s pretty much going to be a number on their head?
My response? Bollocks:
That’s true at EVERY high-level program. If you don’t win within 3-5 years, you’re done. Do you think Florida regrets firing Ron Zook after 3 years and replacing him with Urban Meyer? Do you think Alabama regrets firing Mike Shula after 4 years and replacing him with Nick Saban? Do you think USC regrets firing Paul Hackett after 3 years and replacing him with Pete Carroll? I could go on.
There’s nothing wrong with firing bad coaches. The key is to find the right replacement. The reason Notre Dame has had three consecutive relatively quick firings (within 5 years) is because it’s had three consecutive bad coaches. It’s the hirings you should be criticizing, not the firings.
All coaches at the top programs have “a number on their head…the moment they walk in the door.” They get paid handsomely to deal with the pressure, and they have the potential of huge rewards if they succeed. Again, see Meyer, Saban and Carroll, all of whom have basically become gods among their respective fan bases, and have the potential to become living legends (a la Joe Paterno) if they decide to stick around for a few decades.
So, in conclusion, there is nothing unusual about ND in terms of the “number on their head” thing, and it’s no reason for coaches to run away screaming. Now, the recruiting difficulties caused by high academic standards might be such a reason — but if Charlie Weis proved anything in his tenure, aside from the fact that he’s a bad head coach, it’s that you CAN recruit top-level talent at the skill positions to Notre Dame, academic standards notwithstanding. ND will never be USC or Texas or Alabama or Florida in terms of its recruiting, but it also isn’t doomed to become Northwestern or Duke or (current ephemeral success notwithstanding) Stanford.
Pat Forde has more on this topic. He concludes: “Notre Dame football can rise again, no question about it. But to do so, the school has to make its first good hire in nearly a quarter of a century.”
Irish-haters can snark as much as they want about the frequent firings of recent years, but at worst, those just mean that Notre Dame is behaving like all other major programs routinely do. Does this translate to “Notre Dame is no longer special,” as some claim? I don’t know what the hell that even means. But it seems to me that, if Notre Dame started not firing coaches with sub-.600 winning percentages after giving them a fair shot, that would be a sign that the program has given up all aspirations of greatness and has officially become mediocre. If self-enforced mediocrity is considered “special,” then okay. I think most Irish fans would rather win.
(We can debate whether Willingham was given a fair shot — though his subsequent flop at Washington seems to suggest he was a lost cause anyway, as some intuited at the time — but I don’t think you can argue that Davie and Weis weren’t. They had their chance; they failed. Next!)
I’d argue that the Willingham hire made sense at the time, definitely. He had taken a perenial Pac-10 bottom tier team and brought them to the Rose Bowl for the first time in 27 years. They were a similarly academically challenging school. Plus I’d argue in retrospect that he did a good job of recruiting (you’ll notice that Weis’s good years were the tail end of the Willingham players).
Also in retrospect it was wrong of Notre Dame to fire him, not only because he didn’t get 3 years, but it meant the Huskies hired him 🙂
Do you think CU regrets firing Dan Hawkins after–oh wait…
I disagree about Willingham’s recruiting. The only real success story, in terms of someone he actively recruited, is Brady Quinn. That’s one player. (Samardzija fell in Ty’s lap almost accidentally.) Weis brought in a lot more blue-chip talent than that. Clausen, Tate, Rudolph, Floyd, T’eo, etc. And his recruiting classes were much deeper (though not deep enough, clearly). It’s also an established fact that Weis is a much harder worker on the recruiting trail than Ty. Even Weis-bashers (which is pretty much everyone these days) acknowledge this. He worked his ass off, and in terms of recruiting classes, it paid off. The problem was translating those classes into success on the field.
IMHO, the baffling thing about Weis is the apparent contradiction of his being a better recruiter than Willingham, and also better at developing offensive skill players (specifically QBs and WRs), and yet apparently so bad at putting together even a marginally serviceable offensive line, defensive line or secondary (regardless of how many top recruits he pulled in) that the Irish lost their ability to be competitive, despite all the offensive studs, because they didn’t know how to freaking tackle or block.
While I agree with most of the text, in fact it may be that part of the problem at ND is not so much that it is irrelevant, but it may in fact be a bit too relevant. Brian Kelly is one D1 coach with a “no cause” out to go coach Notre Dame, how many others have similar contract language? Or lacking the contract language have gone on record saying that its their “dream job?” (Urban Meyer, I’m looking at you). Notre Dame even hired a high school coach who was on record that ND was his “dream” job. What’s curious about the Faust hire is that there are probably dozens, maybe hundreds of high school football coaches who share the same dreams Faust did, though none of them made it to South Bend.
While any high school coach would probably love to coach Florida, for example, I doubt hardly any see it as their “dream” job.
Because the ND aura creates such a wide moat for the administration, that may lead to a bit of carelessness in finding a coach. There’s a great post at ND Nation from some professor pointing out that Notre Dame has a 100% success rate when it hires guys who are proven collegiate champions, while they are much less successful taking flyers on unproven guys like Weis/Faust/Davie/etc.
But when every one of those “flyers” is beating down your door desperate to be the program’s head coach, it may cause a breakdown in the evaluation process (e.g. “Nigel Tufnel, head coach of the East Anglia rugby club, seems a bit less prepared than Urban Meyer, but Nigel loves us more than even Urban does, and Nigel will be easier to hire, so he’s probably not as bad as he seems…”)
P.S. That said, David, if Notre Dame is able to land a good coach, I think you’ll be surprised at how quickly that person will assemble Weis’s talent into a winning team — and not just a team that papers over its deficiencies through the brilliance of a Brady Quinn type, like Weis’s 2005 and 2006 teams, but actually a good, solid football team, capable of doing things like winning top-level bowls. The talent is there, in a depth that it manifestly wasn’t when Weis took over. They just need a coach.
(In retrospect, the 2005 USC game was pretty clearly a fluke, caused in large part by the sort of factors that often create upsets and close shaves in rivalry games, no? The OT loss to a mediocre Michigan State team, and the near-loss to Stanford at season’s end, and of course the not-as-close-as-the-score Fiesta Bowl loss to Ohio State — a team that was itself “exposed,” with much of the same personnel, the following year against Florida — were much more representative of who that 2005 team was. The experience of the 2006 team, with three blowout losses due to horrible defense and O-line play, made this apparent. And then Quinn left, and it all went to hell, despite the best efforts of the next generation of offensive studs.)
It strikes me that Golfing, er, Willingham may have been a half decent coach, if a clearly inferior recruiter. It may be that Weis’ early success at ND can be attributed to guys who had been coached by a reasonably competent staff (i.e. Willingham’s), and that as the proportion of players only coached in the Weis era piled up, so did the losses.
A potential support to this argument is the fact that Clausen, the most accomplished player in the Weis-only era, was the third person in his immediate family to play D1 quarterback, which suggests he may have had access to learning what it took to succeed at Notre Dame’s level, even if his coaching staff didn’t really know.
Hire a coach who has proven he can win at the D1 level and the prodigious talent at Notre Dame will win, and they will win a lot.
Indeed, perhaps the most logical explanation is that Willingham, while a terrible gameday coach, was better at player development (or at least his staff was) than we realized, specifically with regard to the non-stud/skill players. It had been widely assumed (including by me) that Weis’s success in turning Brady Quinn into a beast at QB was proof that he’s better at developing talent than Ty, but it would seem that either: 1) that’s only true of stud skill players; with respect to the other players, Ty and his staff were actually better; and/or 2) Ty was actually an even worse gameday coach that we realized, such that, although he was actually developing all of his talent (including Quinn) quite well, it never showed on the field, except during that weird smoke-and-mirrors stretch in early 2002 (with, ahem, Davie’s players).
Don’t look now, Brendan, but Northwestern has gone to bowls back to back years!
Pat Fitzgerald, coach of the Fighting Irish seems to have a nice ring to it. Espicially considering his success at Northwestern.
But yes, I’m with you here. ND isn’t unusual in this respect, and shouldn’t be criticized for firing bad coaches.
Having shilled for this book several times on this blog, I’ll skip to saying that the perceived skill development of stud players in Weis era may merely reflect the (limited) effect of Weis’ vaunted “decided schematic advantage”.
Take an uber-talented skill position player like Floyd or Tate or Rudolph or Clausen and give him a handful of those clever Belichick/Weis plays, and they will look pretty flashy some of the time and put up decent stats. But, as Colvin writes, greatness comes about not from “decided schematic advantages” but from purposeful work in the unglamorous hours where the winners put distance between themselves and the losers.
Which is the kind of thing Casey Clausen might have impressed upon his younger brother.
And a champion coach can impress upon the rest of the extremely-talented Irish team.
Brendan, isn’t it also possible that while not getting as many Blue Chippers, Willingham recruited players who could actually, given the right game day situation play better? My dad always said he’d take a decent player who would work hard over a supposed star who didn’t feel like he had to.
Isn’t it also possible that the players were allready improving and might have perfromed as well or atleast better after another year regardless of who the coach was? I mean he wasn’t in his first year at QB anymore, and if you look at his stats, under his second year with Weiss he actually stayed the same/took a step back.
Weis may have gotten bigger names, but it didn’t seem like he could make them into anything great.
In fact, what appears to be development of skill position players may really only reflect the development of Weis’ “decided schematic advantage”, reflected by fancy plays concocted by he or Belichick or Belichick’s nerd Naval Academy friends who come up with said plays.
For example, if you have exceptionally talented skill position players like Floyd and Tate and Rudolph, and let’s say you flood a zone with those guys, maybe send Tate on a fly pattern, with Floyd doing a deep post and Rudolph running a mid-level out pattern, it is fairly predictable that an inferior secondary such as Navy’s will struggle with that, and if Navy is in a cover two you know the linebacker will go with Rudolph, while the safety will have to commit to either Floyd or Tate, leaving the other receiver covered by (no doubt late-arriving) help. Give Clausen a fairly simple decision rule, and the play will succeed a lot of the time, mainly because the play is more advanced than the defenders.
Compare this with a guy like Peyton Manning’s approach, where he has developed such sophistication that his receivers don’t even really run patterns anymore, they just know based on defensive looks where on the field they should be, and Peyton knows it too, and they go from there. The Manning level of excellence is what Colvin has in mind, and the Colts only get there through countless hours of preparation when no one is watching.
A college team won’t prepare as much as Team Manning, if for no other reason than that they might get in RichRod-type trouble. But witnessing strong performance from talented skill position players may reflect good plays, and not so much good players. In fact, Weis may not have developed any good players, at least not in the Peyton Manning-sense of developed…
Better luck with the next guy.