Charlie Weis: Finally- Something to Write About

By Ryan McGowan

God bless Notre Dame.  

You’d think with my last name that I’d be a bigger Fighting Irish fan, but I’m not.  I’m not a Notre Dame hater, just more of a Notre Dame agnostic; I am basically indifferent to the institution.  (As opposed to a Notre Dame atheist, who believes that Notre Dame doesn’t exist.)  But God bless them today.  I love Notre Dame.Because if they hadn’t come up and offered Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis a contract as their new head football coach, there would be preciously very little to write about today.  Sure, as a Patriots fan I was sad to see Weis take the job, but as a writer I couldn’t have been happier.  Notre Dame is getting Weis! Yippee!!! Something to write about!!

This is where we’re at with the Patriots.  As a collective fandom, we are becoming bored out of our minds with the Pats.  My roommate Beth and I watched the Browns game last Saturday. It was supposed to be a tough road contest in front of merciless, medieval fans, playing a slobberingly hungry team who was ready to go out and thump the world champs and send a message that their head coach was the cog in the wheel that had to go.  Instead, Bethel Johnson returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, and Beth and I found ourselves passed out, drooling on the couch, pretzel crumbs on our chests, feeling like the kid from Ferris Bueller who passes out in Ben Stein’s history class and finds a tapeworm on his desk.  

IT WAS THE THIRD QUARTER!  ROHAN DAVEY WAS PLAYING QUARTERBACK!  Randall Gay, a guy who wasn’t even a starter on his college team, returned an interception all the way.  Rumor has it that Belichick placed a call from the sidelines and asked Andre Tippett, Andre Agassi, Andre the Giant, and Andre Krimm (from Necessary Roughness) to come down and suit up.  I think I saw Pedro’s midget friend go out and kick a PAT at one point.  It would have made the air on VH1’s “Most Awesomely Bad Football Games.”

I can’t remember falling asleep during a Patriots game before.  I fall asleep routinely while watching movies, sitting in my grad school classes, and driving, but not while watching the Pats.  But watching that Cleveland game was like watching one of those early September college games where Stonehill takes a big payday to go down to Blacksburg and lose 96-0 to Virginia Tech.  The Bengals game was more entertaining, but the outcome of the game was never legitimately in doubt.  I think Tom Brady threw to Patrick Pass from his ass on purpose; he was bored and wanted to change things up a little bit.  It was roughly akin to picking up 2-7 offsuit in early position and coming in with a substantial raise.  Sometimes you just get bored and want some action.

What has there been to write about this season?  At least with the Red Sox you have daily controversy and soap opera dynamics.  You have midseason trade rumors, off season free agency, weekly demands to fire the manager, mango trees, and unidentified paternity questions.  If you cover politics, you have the inevitable scandals, bribery, nannies with blurry citizenship status, and soggy cigars.  In college sports you have shady recruiting, booster payouts, and kick-ass recruiting parties with 10 kegs and 20 strippers.  With the Patriots, the best we can dig up is, “Corey Dillon wanted to go in the game and get two more yards so he can get 100.  Did Belichick know about this?  Was there a scheme here to get Corey his 100 yards, even though he has no financial incentive to do so?”  What that gets us is hilarious exchanges such as the butch-slapping that Dillon gave to Steve Buckley in the locker room on Sunday, but it still give us no material to write about.  Or, you could do what I’m doing now, which is writing about how there is nothing to write about.

We are turning into the ultimate fat cats, becoming more and more every day like the Yankee fans we despise.  We look at the Pittsburgh defeat and we scoff, saying “Good job, boys, now let’s see if you can beat us when it counts.”  We think back to the opening night game against the Colts, and remain supremely confident that Peyton Manning, even with his incredible talents, could never master a Belichick/Crennel defense in January in Foxboro.  San Diego?  Upstarts.  Philadelphia?  Pretenders.  A good team… for the NFC.  Let’s see T.O. go across the middle against Rodney Harrison in February.  

This is what our mindset is turning into — counting down the days until the playoffs begin.  This must be what it has been like to root for the Yankees for the past ten years.  We might not win it all this year, but the regular season is becoming more and more irrelevant, less a seventeen-week maturation process and storyline than a prologue and setup for playoff seeding.

Which is where Notre Dame came in.  The Fighting Irish, in their ultimate ineptitude and delusions of grandeur, finally managed to give us scribes something to write about with regards to the Patriots in the regular season.  First of all, it is impossible not to be happy for Charlie Weis for taking this job.  Even though the academic standards alone are enough to make most college coaches rather suffer through 30 years of the clap than take the Notre Dame job, for Weis it is a dream opportunity.  Very few times in life does an opportunity come along with the perfect timing and circumstances to be truly “once in a lifetime.” To go back to his alma mater for his first big-time head coaching job and try to bring the Irish back to a point where they are once again relevant in national college football is that chance.  (Six years and $2 million a year doesn’t hurt either.)  

He couldn’t have stayed at New England forever, always the lieutenant to the godlike Belichick, always passed over for head jobs in favor of coordinators from teams who weren’t in the Super Bowl and thus were able to interview for the positions.  He had surgery a few years ago to lower his weight and make him more symbolically attractive as a head coach.  When most people say, “I would kill to have that job,” Charlie Weis meant it, only he meant he would almost kill himself.  If there’s any doubt as to whether being a head coach is what he really wants, look no further than his gastric bypass surgery.

So, finally, we have a distraction to write about in Foxboro.  If the Pats only score 17 points against the Jets, Ron Borges and his minions might ask if perhaps Weis was distracted from watching film of ND’s bowl game and mailed in the game plan.  If Tom Brady throws an interception, it will be suspected that Weis neglected a minute detail in the pass progression because he was asking ND alum David Givens about the new, hip bars in South Bend.  It will somehow be linked that Weis was responsible for the leaks in the Big Dig tunnel.  Someone will have exclusive video of the Pistons-Pacers brawl that can zero in on Weis in the stands, allegedly on an illegal recruiting visit, radioing down to Ron Artest and instructing him to rush the stands.  

Anything and everything that goes wrong with the Patriots the rest of the season will be suspected to be because of Weis working double duty.  For a team that has so long prided itself on its mental focus and ability to block out “distractions,” I can’t see why this will be any different.  Will there be some adversity? Of course.  Belichick and the rest of the staff will have to compromise a bit and allow Weis a small amount of leeway in the schedule so he can begin to set up his staff and plan for spring practice, which will start about five weeks after the Super Bowl (again, I’m assuming the Pats will be there.  Arrogant?  Probably.)  

Hey, good for Charlie Weis.  We’ll miss him in New England, but I’m sure he’ll be happy in South Bend.  Maybe he’ll even motivate me to watch a few more Irish games next season.   And thank God for Notre Dame.  I’m glad we have SOMETHING to talk about over the next few weeks besides who’s making which plans for which hotel rooms in Jacksonville.