He embodies the Peter Principle

Quoted from Blue Gray Sky (March 25, 2010) (sic):

It's interesting to look back to that Winter of 2004. Eight years of mediocrity were capped by the controversial firing of Willingham, and many people -- including some of our own alums in the national media -- were proclaiming that Notre Dame was beyond salvaging; that the Irish would never again compete for a national champsionship; that, indeed, "the mystique [was] dead." Then, the rejection by Urban Meyer, a bitter pill that seemed to confirm our worst fears about the future of the program. Notre Dame was done.

Then Charlie walked in the door. He came in with bluster and bravado, saying, in effect [screw] that, we're not dead yet, Notre Dame can still compete. And I'm going to lead the charge. From today's vantage point looking back, Charlie's words might seem empty, nothing but a lot of talk and a badge. And he certainly didn't fulfill his early promises. But at the time, the attitude was critical. Charlie was a shot in the arm that was sorely needed. After being rebuffed and rejected and discounted by everyone, here was somebody -- one of our own, too -- who was willing to take that dead-end Notre Dame job, not make excuses, and try to turn this thing around. That five years later he's fallen short and been replaced doesn't mean we should turn those early statements against him. We were reeling, and his attitude and willingness to lead was exactly what we needed at the time.

If anything, Charlie proved that Notre Dame can still compete. He put the lie to the lazy, armchair conclusions about academic standards being too stringent, or that top-flight recruits wouldn't give South Bend a second look, or that Notre Dame could no longer go up against Southern Cal and Michigan and Florida and steal players out from under them. All of those built-in excuses that were proffered by Bob Davie, calcified via Willingham and lazily adopted by the blinkered national media (and much of their mouth-breathing readership) have been systematically disproven over the last five years. Can Notre Dame recruit? Notre Dame can recruit. Can it win? Notre Dame can win. No excuses, indeed. We can compete. We can win. Charlie might not have accomplished it, but he proved it possible. The failures of Charlie Weis are not endemic to Notre Dame. Today, when looking back on the Weis era, we hold him to his own standard, and can say that he did not get the job done; but proudly so, for without him, there might be no more standard.

End quote.

with or without Weis. Though I admit the negative swirl around ND was a bit crazy at that time. Still, it was just swirl.

That all said, this is about the description that Weis made Brady, not about Weis. I take no pleasure in his failure

Willingham put ND in a horrific position and Weis brought back the belief that ND could win

ND was dying a slow death under David/Willingham. I actually blame Willingham for the 2007 debacle as Weis had a very bare cupboard

Apparently the cupboard wasn't that bare based on the 2005 season (and 2006) and subsequent success of many of those key players in the NFL.

Ara came within a bad call in YEAR ONE of winning a title, inheriting a mess.

No matter how bad TW left things, there is zero excuse in year three for that trainwreck. The head coach owns that 100%.

about where Kelly has been recruiting for a while now. You're right, the cupboard was not that bare based on the 2005 and 2006 season, because those classes had upperclassmen talent. They couldn't succeed against teams like OSU or LSU in the bowl games because they did not have depth, but they could hold their own against very good teams in, let's say, a home game.

But the cupboard was EXTREMELY bare come 2007 thanks to Ty's golfing. The head coach does not "own that 100%", don't be ridiculous. Now some of the recruiting is on Weis there, he could have mitigated one of the bad classes some by coming in to recruit right away rather than staying on with the Patriots for a few more months.

I do agree, a better coach would have done a lot better than 3-9 in 2007. But even an Urban Meyer could not have coached that team to 9-3. I would say a good coach could have brought the 2007 team to 5-7, while even a guy like Urban Meyer would have needed a miracle to get them to 8-4 thanks to Ty's lazy ass. There's a reason why Urban Meyer turned Notre Dame down, look how quickly he won at Florida... he knew he had no chance of achieving that at Notre Dame.

a team full of players that had played for him 2 seasons entering 2007. Yes, he was missing a true senior class. However, he had a full junior and sophomore class and the real reason Weis got his ass handed to him 2007 and every year after that is because he flat out cannot teach college kids how to play the game.

What Weis can do is take people that have been trained on the fundamentals by someone else and he can then create a scheme and call offensive plays well -- evidenced in the NFL and his 2005 and 2006 seasons.

and certainly would have had the team more competitive in the games that it did lose.

The first team was young, but crap, they were talented.

LT--Sam Young--SO. Drafted. Still playing in the NFL.
LG--Mike Turkovich--JR. Undrafted. Signed with Cowboys. Waived.
C--John Sullivan--5th. Drafted. Still playing in the NFL. Heading to the Super Bowl
RG--Eric Olson--SO. Drafted the by Broncos and waived.
RT--Paul Duncan--JR. Didn't play in the NFL.
TE--John Carlson--SR. Drafted and retired after 6 seasons in the NFL.
QB--Jimmy Clausen--FR. Drafted by Bears. Played 3 years in the NFL.

And that's just the offensive line and the guy under center.

Like 2016, that year was marred by stubborn stupidity and the inability to develop a game-day strategy suitable to the players on the field rather than the coaches' (Weis and BVG) delusions in the heads.

Ty is certainly responsible for the lack of talent in the recruiting classes that became JRs and SRs in the 2007 season. That's supposed to be the core of the team, and that core was rotten. I don't hold Weis (with his Patriots obligations) accountable for not doing more to salvage the recruiting class that signed 2 months after he was hired. That's just so late in the process. I doubt it would have made much of a difference if he or some other coach would have been able to take over full time on day 1. Weis could have done more to polish that turd over the next 2 years and gotten more production out of them by the time 2007 came around.... but it really was a turd.

However, Weis is responsible for getting very little production out of his first full recruiting class, who were Sophomores in 2007. That was a pretty highly rated class but there were lots of transfers and lack of development from the guys who stayed. I think Sam Young and Eric Olsen were the only guys drafted, and they both went very late.

In the bigger picture, it wasn't really going to matter what their record was in 2007. The 3-9 record would have been forgiven as an explainable blip if Weis had got the team back on track by 2009. But that obviously didn't happen. In hindsight, Weis's lack of experience at the college level made him ill equipped to handle the rebuilding job that needed to be happening behind the scenes at the scout team level and in the weight room during the 2005 and 2006 seasons.

nobody forced him to try and grab bag. He did dumb shit all year long, starting in the off season and all throughout summer camp. No ND team should ever lose to a service academy, let alone not be in the game at all against them (AFA).

It was a terrible job of coaching all around, especially by him and by his DC hire.

No matter how bare the cupboard was, it wasn't "get blown out by Air Force" bad. It wasn't "Yakety Sax let Jimmy Clausen run for his life" bad. Like BVG after the injuries in 2014, Weis made no adjustment in his strategy to account for the fact he had a young, thin team. He schemed his way into complete and utter embarrassment. The only surprises from that year was how he possibly beat UCLA and Stanford.

While he may have helped turn around the recruiting train wreck Willingham had left behind, he game-day was easily the worst to grace our sidelines in my lifetime. Probably of all time. Yes, even worse than Willingham.

you've got to give him part of 2012. Weis was just a bad HC. But I also think he changed the narrative on ND and where she was going the last two years of Willingham. The program was atrocious and wasn't coming back under that guy.

I attended the '05 SC game and thought it was a phenomenal gameplan. And was probably the downfall of Weis. He thought he could gameplan people to death instead of working the fundamentals like Carroll and his coaches did.

Surely that entitles me to something.

At the end of the first half in the GT game, the former Mrs. Meatwhistle looked at me and inquired, "This is why you spend so much time on the internet?"

Scheme over fundamentals, lack of attention to defense and special teams contributed to the demise of Charlie and arguably should have led to Kelly getting shown the door with BVG in that disaster of a season.

The primary driver for the "success" of the last two years is owed to some coaches that drilled fundamentals into at least some positions on the team. The OLine has been fairly solid for a reason (an might be tailing off for a reason). It's not a coincidence that there has been a lot of success because of the better blocking and tackling. I also see the failures of both Charlie and Brian as having serious problems finding and retaining a group of position coaches that hone the fundamentals of their positions (and are at least willing recruiters of their positions as well). Coupled with OC's and DC's that have trouble articulating a philosophy and scheme to their charges and you have the ability to lose to damn near anyone in the country even if you have the talent to beat damn near anyone in the country.

Weis could have coached the 2007 team to a 7-5 type record with more reasonable decisions and could have and should have won 10+ games in 2009. He is a bad head coach and there’s a reason no one wants to hire him.

that roster was that year. Some of how bad the roster was falls on Weis, he could have mitigated one of those putrid classes some by coming to ND sooner, but where do you see 4 more wins?

Navy for sure, that was a bad Navy team that even Weis should have been capable of winning that year. I could see a better coach getting wins against Purdue and Air Force too, but after that I have a very difficult time seeing where the wins should have come from.

You'll get no disagreement whatsoever from me about 2009 though, good lowered that was an offensively talented team that should have had the type of year Oklahoma has had the last couple of years.

things that you should keep in mind:

1) Georgia Tech, Navy, Purdue, and AFA were all pretty mediocre that year, if I recall correctly. The fact that we completely shit our pants in those games doesn't all of a sudden make them great teams. I'm sure there are other games on the schedule that I can point out, but there's 4 for sure that you can see as winnable even with our "awful" roster (that had several future NFL players on it, including a center getting ready to play in the Super Bowl).

edit: Michigan State was pretty shitty that year too and Michigan was awful before we played them having lost to a 1AA team and Oregon and then we didn't even bother to get on the bus to play them.

2) It is one thing to lose and quite another to get completely undressed because you're unprepared and try to completely change offenses after one half of football and have a defensive coordinator in completely over his head. They made personnel choices in the pre-season that contributed to some of the blowout losses and our defensive scheme was completely unfit for a college team and we didn't have anything near the players needed to make it work and that should have been evident in spring practice.


Now, the last thing I will point out is that some of the choices (namely, more playing time for Clausen and a few other young guys) that cost us wins in 2007 likely led to better play in the following years and COULD have worked out had Weis been able to focus on other areas of the team besides the qb and offensive positions. What makes 2007 worse, IMO, is shitting the bed in 2009 with a talented and experienced team.

It's one thing to lose. It's another thing to suck. We lost a lot of games that year, largely because of Willingham's poor recruiting. We sucked that year, exclusively because of Weis' poor coaching.

While he fell short in a lot of categories, he took a shitty intermediate situation and left the cupboards fuller than when he arrived. Now going 3-9, 6-6, 6-6.......

is embarrassing.

At receiver and TE you had Floyd, Tate, Rudolph all starting. Tate and Rudolph are multi-year all-pro NFL talents, and Floyd was probably the best collegiate receiver of the three.

Clausen had his limitations but was an unbelievably accurate college QB by that point.

Running backs you had Allen, Gray, Hughes, Riddick, Aldridge (plus Cierre Wood who didn't play)

and a fairly easy November schedule (which was a winless month?) was beyond frustrating. There were some forecasters that picked us to be in the National Championship game that August.

Minter was fine but he made a huge mistake with Brown and Tenuta and what made it worse was that those guys didn't even get along and they split the defense in half.

Tenuta wouldn't even take the time to learn how to slow down zone read, for God's sake. It's like he felt it was below him.

the clock at the end of games and instead freaking tried to score again passing the ball when simply taking a knee three times would have ended the game and/or eliminated enough time that the other team couldn't score even if God granted them a miracle.

The guy lacked any and all aspects of common sense during games. He needed a baby sitter and when he had one in the NFL he was able to do well.

Kyle Rudolph, Golden Tate, Harrison Smith, Tyler Eifert, Zack Martin (latter two were freshmen, but we went 8-5 the two years after that...)

Alabama had 4 guys on the 2009 roster that ended up going to a Pro Bowl.

a couple of years, even with lesser recruiting .

He tried, he sucked. He’s gone. End of story.

Weis’ attitude since his tenure here, with every indication being that he feels totally “screwed” by the University that (very unjustly) gave him tens of millions in severance comp (that very easily could’ve gone toward need-based aid/scholarships), tells me all I need to know about the man.

And that’s putting aside numerous other stories of boorish, classless behavior — a couple of which are first hand — during his time on campus.

Fuck that piece of shit.

"gave him tens of millions in severance comp (that very easily could’ve gone toward need-based aid/scholarships"

We have an eleventy gazillion dollar endowment. If we really wanted to give out more aid, we could.

ditch-diggers too.

Taken at face value, I'm understanding you're comment to read if you need financial aid to attend ND, the school is better off without you.

I thought you were being sarcastic, but then did a double take and thought it better to clarify.

Weis was one of the first people to tweet out congratulations to Kyle Rudolph for winning the NFL Man of the Year. Of course, Rudolph had not yet won it (he won the fan vote), so while it was a nice gesture by CW, it was just another example of his inattention to detail, which had cost him so much while head coach. The irony did not escape me.