Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis will have a very good resume if and when he hits the job market this winter after the Fighting Irish wrap up their third consecutive mediocre-to-bad season in a few weeks. He was a member of the coaching staff on four Super Bowl winning teams (one as an offensive assistant with the New York Giants in 1990 and three as the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots in 2001, 2003, and 2004). He also led the Fighting Irish, his alma mater, to major bowl games in his first two seasons in South Bend.
But time is running out on Charlie Weis. It went down quickly after Weis’s second year, as the Irish struggled to a 3-9 record in 2007, the school’s worst in its illustrious football history. In 2008, Notre Dame started the season 4-1, only to lose five of their last seven games and finish the regular season at 6-6, the epitome of mediocrity. This season, the Irish were returning a lot of talent and the talk around South Bend was that anything less than 10-2 and a trip to a Bowl Championship Series bowl game would be a major disappointment. Well, disappointment now reigns in northern Indiana as the Irish have struggled to a 6-4 record thus far this season after Saturday night’s loss against Pittsburgh. The Irish are already bowl eligible, and will be invited to a post season game no matter what they do. And that’s a good thing because Notre Dame plays Connecticut and suddenly resurgent Stanford in its final two contests.
It is widely assumed that Weis will be fired either after the Stanford game or after the Irish play in a bowl game, which will bring to an end one of the oddest coaching careers in college football history. Midway through his first season at the helm at Notre Dame, Weis was given a 10-year extension to his contract to remain the Notre Dame coach, something Weis’s predecessor, Tyrone Willingham, was never offered despite going 8-0 to start his first campaign in South Bend. Weis bragged that his NFL pedigree would give the Irish a distinct tactical advantage every week when playing against college competition, but in the last three years, the Irish are just 16-19, have lost to Navy two of the last three seasons, and have never beaten USC in Weis’s tenure. We at A Casual Fan have a hard time rooting for anyone to lose a job. These coaches have families and the speculation must be hard on Weis’s assistant coaches, whose jobs are also tied to Weis’s success. But Charlie Weis, by accepting that extension and by boasting about his intellectual superiority in the realm of football, has made his own bed. He’ll probably land on his feet, becoming the offensive coordinator for some NFL team next season. But we’re willing to bet the house that he will not be back prowling the sidelines for his alma mater next season.
A Casual Fan 