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.