Did Charlie Weis all of a sudden forget how to coach? An interesting question ““ being posed by the derailment of the Notre Dame football program.
The latest man to walk the Notre Dame sideline in the long shadow of Knute Rockne comes to the Rose Bowl this weekend without a win on the season. For anyone with an idea of college football history, it seems inconceivable that the Fighting Irish could be 0-5. And that stands for good reason: This is the first time in the program’s history that the Irish have lost their first five games.
What’s more astonishing, the Irish haven’t just lost. They’ve been pummeled. They’ve been beaten, on average, by more than three touchdowns a game. As porous as the defense has been, the biggest shock has been the ineptitude of the Irish offense. They’ve passed for less than 200 yards per game and rushed for just 30.4 yards on average. The numbers are so staggering it makes one wonder whether or not Notre Dame is the worst football team in the country. (Think about that. Worse that Temple ““ or Buffalo?)
Weis came to South Bend, Ind., billed as an offensive guru who had developed Tom Brady into a Hall of Fame quarterback and sprouted from two prestigious coaching trees. After working under Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick, Weis was christened the next great college coach. And with a new 10-year contract extension, the Little Tuna is now paid like it. But was it all a mistake? Or has Weis suddenly lost all the coaching knowledge he accrued the last 20 years?
Reality is somewhere in between. The truth is that Weis is a good coach who learned from a couple of legends, but he isn’t going to reinvent the wheel at Notre Dame. He still needs good players and a few cupcakes on the schedule to get the annual 10 wins that are required for Notre Dame standards. But if Weis gets something of a free pass because he is coaching many of Tyrone Willingham’s recruits, then he shouldn’t quite get all the credit for the development of Brady Quinn, a Willingham recruit who spent two years in the West Coast offense before Weis arrived.
And maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t completely buy into the coaching pipeline theory, which stipulates that a great, winning head coach has a stock of assistants just waiting to win their own titles. Maybe Tom Brady made Weis look a lot smarter and not the other way around. Well, there is at least one man at UCLA who would disagree with me.
UCLA defensive coordinator DeWayne Walker was the secondary coach for the New England Patriots, and he spent a year with Weis on Belichick’s staff. He, for one, does buy into the pipeline theory.
“I buy into it big time,” Walker said. “Charlie has been in that Belichick system, and he’s learned the formula for success.
“There have a been a few coaches in the history of the game who’ve been able to win consistently: Bill Walsh, Tony Dungy. These guys have brought assistant coaches into their system who have watched and learned what it takes to win on a regular basis.”
UCLA coach Karl Dorrell is another coaching pipeline product. He worked under Denver Broncos head coach Mike Shanahan, who was a West Coast offense disciple of the late, great Walsh. Every once in a while, a true innovator comes along, such as Walsh, to permanently change the way people view the game. But those kind of revolutionary thinkers are few and far between. And Walker said that’s not really what makes the coaching pipeline real.
“There’s no one way to win,” he said. “But all these coaching systems have one thing in common: they’ve found a formula that works. The formula breeds success.
“But the formula is not perfect. You still need the players to make plays and respond to the system. And even then, it’s tough to know why some teams don’t have success.
“A very young, talented team can still struggle.”
Notre Dame is certainly struggling to win a game. And the Irish are young. Whether or not they have much talent is still a mystery.
E-mail de Jong at adejong@media.ucla.edu.