By Paul M. Banks
Notre Dame has fired Head Coach Charlie Weis. The university is apparently deciding to eat his contract. Insert your own joke about Weis and eating here. At 5pm ND will hold a news conference making the firing “official”. During these last five years of Weiss coaching ND, hundreds of us sports bloggers made numerous funny, but also extremely juvenile, jokes about Weis’ weight. I am not apologizing, and I don’t think anyone else will either. Weis was so arrogant and unapologetic about his arrogance that he invited these fat-ass jokes upon himself. He was deluded into thinking he automatically had an inherent Xs and Os advantage over everyone. Ask Navy, Pitt, Connecticut and Stanford about that. Or better yet look at Weis’ 35-27 body of work. Let’s not look at his body please which is reminiscent of Grimace from McDonald’s land) Despite having (supposedly) some of the best recruiting classes in the nation, year in and year out.
Weis also made his program as inaccessible to the media as a college football team can be. He even refused to do a post game press conference after the loss to Stanford on Saturday and shut out the media following the Clausen incident from last weekend. You know that whole thing about Clausen getting drunk and getting beat up by a Notre Dame “fan” the weekend before Thanksgiving. So again, he made very few friends in the press and/or the blogosphere, and his standoffishness invited us all to point out how his body is shaped like a Christmas tree.
Junior QB Jimmy Clausen, another one of college football’s household names, is likely to leave Notre Dame as well. Except his departure be voluntary. Clausen was seen giving his football helmet to his family following the 45-38 loss to Stanford, and is strongly expected to declare for the NFL draft.
For Weis, he supposedly has at least six offers from NFL teams to become their offensive coordinator. An assistant who none of us have ever heard of will step in for Weis for the time being. If they accept a bowl bid, sorry Charlie, but you won’t be on the sideline. The way things are going Clausen may not be there either!
So who’s the next Coach at Notre Dame? I’m going to say Bob Stoops. WGN’s David Kaplan says he has sources that indicate ND could be moving in that direction, and I trust Kap and his group of insiders, because he was the first to break the story on Clausen getting into a fight at a local bar and getting too black eyes.