December 3, 2008
Not A Small-Time Thing
by RYAN O'LEARY
Assistant Editor
BlueandGold.com
Threw on the trench, kissed the girl goodbye
She said ‘Special Ed, don’t go, you might die’
Started crying/and hugging on me so I shot her
I said ‘Sorry baby, but I gotta do what I gotta’
– Special Ed, “The Mission”
Why this is the song that popped into my head this morning after the formal announcement that Charlie Weis would remain the head football coach at Notre Dame, I’m not really sure. Yet somehow, it seems to fit.
The mission, of course, was retaining Weis...and new athletics director Jack Swarbrick was smart enough to realize what he had to do.
As for the desperate, teary-eyed girl in his way...well, Irish fans, you’re a perfect fit.
It certainly hasn't been a bump-free ride for Weis, but another year is deserved.
The mob mentality I’ve seen on this website and elsewhere over the past few weeks has been nothing short of an embarrassment. I’ve been ashamed to call myself a Notre Dame fan, since that would entail me being lumped in with this myopic and emotionally unstable crowd that seems to have gathered.
You’ve turned BlueandGold.com into Jerry Springer’s green room, folks. Congratulations.
Keeping Weis in place was absolutely, unquestionably the right thing to do...and while there are a multitude of reasons why, you really only need one.
Success – real, lasting, long-term success – takes time. If a building isn’t up to code, you can’t just fix the problem by slapping on a fresh coat of paint and fixing the windows. You’ve got to rebuild from the ground up, and that’s exactly what Weis has done.
Has it been a bump-free ride? Sure hasn’t – but if you expected it to be, then you’re just plain stupid. The debris is still being cleared from the failed construction jobs that came in the 15 years prior to Weis’ arrival, and rather than continue the vicious cycle by doing something rash in hopes of a quick fix, Swarbrick and John Jenkins opted to try something different.
As for the whiny complaint that Weis is learning on the job, guess what? Every coach, or at least every good one, is consistently learning on the job. There is no such thing as a finished product. The bottom line is that Charlie Weis is not stupid. He’s one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever come across, and he’s forgotten more about football than most of us ever knew. On top of that, he’s constantly working tirelessly to make himself and his team better.
Basically, he’s Bill Belichick.
It’s easy to forget that Belichick’s first few years as a head coach weren’t exactly smooth sailing – he was 36-44 in a five-year stint with the Cleveland Browns, and 5-11 in his first season with New England. As with Weis, the calls for Belichick’s head came early and often...and in Cleveland, they won out.
Belichick continued to “learn on the job” – and he’s since won three times as many Super Bowls as the current Browns and the original ones (Baltimore Ravens) combined. He’s working on an eighth consecutive winning season, something that’s just about unheard of in the NFL’s salary-cap era.
Bill Parcells was 3-8 and 3-12-1 in his first two seasons as a head coach. He, too, did okay with that “learning on the job” thing.
Talent – more importantly, mature talent – has a way of making even the most middling coach look good (ask Joe Torre). We saw Weis win with mature talent in 2005 and 2006, and those rosters had no depth. By 2010, he’ll have the mature talent and the depth – and he’ll have built it up himself through his tireless work as a recruiter.
He deserves the chance to finish what he started.
Swarbrick was smart enough to realize that...or at least smart enough to realize that there wasn’t a viable quick-fix option out there anyway. Sure, someone like Brian Kelly (Cincinnati) or Chris Petersen (Boise State) could have come in next year and won football games – they’ve proven themselves capable of taking the stable foundation that someone else built and adding onto it. But they haven’t proven that they can handle the pressure cooker at a major program – do you really think there’d be any real pressure on Kelly in Cincy if he were 6-6 right now?
Weis has already been handling it. Sure, he’s a work in progress, but so is the program as a whole. They’re growing up together...and you don’t go through puberty without pimples. Dealing with that awkward process in the most public of forums isn’t an easy thing to handle...but eventually, adulthood comes.
I’m glad Swarbrick, who has steered four of his own children through that process, gets it.
He had his mission – to let the maturation that was already underway continue uninterrupted, pimples and all. And just like Special Ed, he shot the crying girl that tried to stop him. He did what he had to.
I’m not sure what will hurt the angry mob more – that metaphorical bullet hole from failing to hold back Swarbrick...or the eventual success of the mission they didn’t believe in.
When it works, don’t you dare try to claim it as your own.
