So a guy takes a week off and look what happens? The Cubs are winning (sure, now they pull that crap), Notre Dame looks like a real football team and Mike Kiley thinks Dusty and Jim Hendry are going to get contract extensions? Maybe I’ll just go away again.
Let’s start with the Irish. It is true that their offense was impressive in the 42-21 win over Pissburgh on Saturday night. But things are getting carried away. An opener doesn’t make the season (though it can kill one), especially not when the coach on the other side is the brilliant Dave Wannstedt.
Not until the Irish beat a talented team with a good coach (not so fast, Lloyd Carr) can Irish fans rightly get too fired up about their team. It was nice to see a competently run offense, something that the Irish haven’t had since about 1996. I’m just saying you don’t really know what you have until the guy calling the shots on the other side of the field isn’t one of the dumbest men in football history.
OK, to call Dave Wannstedt dumb is probably an overstatement. Confused? Sure. Indecisive? Of course.
It was fun to watch him get yelled at by a 20 year old quarterback (and deserve it), and to decide to go for it on fourth down twice, only to have a timeout (one by Pitt, one by ND) change his mind both times. The only thing missing was long-time Wanny sychophant Tony Wise reaching into his pants during the game. (Now that was a Hallmark moment.)
Honestly, why did Pitt think it was a good idea to bring him back to his alma mater? What had he done in stops in Chicago and Miami that proved he was an actual competent coach? This is a guy who three seasons ago took a first place football team with two weeks to go and missed the playoffs altogether. A guy who drafted punters and defensive linemen with one leg in the second round. A guy who treated players injuries like they wouldn’t really exist if he just pretended they weren’t there, and you wanted this guy to run your football team?
And on the other sidelines, Notre Dame has a guy who after one game is being bronzed (it’s going to take a shitload of bronze) and sent straight to the College Football Hall of Fame (it is in South Bend, after all).
As an Irish fan I’ve liked everything Charlie Weis has done since he showed up on campus. He’s rough and gruff and showed up with a playbook thick enough to choke a mule, or a Notre Dame cheerleader (whichever’s bigger–year to year it’s a tossup). His offense is diverse and creative, his defense is based on getting guys in the right spots and hoping they can tackle (they were at about a 50 percent clip on the tackling part Saturday night, if they do that again, Michigan might not stop scoring), and he emphasizes special teams as a full third of the game. It showed in the kicking game. It did not show in the fact that they couldn’t try an extra point because the holder was drinking Gatorade on the sidelines, or in the three penalties they got for having too many men on the field.
But Charlie does some little things that I’ve always wondered why coaches don’t do. He uses a wide receiver Jeff Smard;kjdfkjdfkldjfkldjfka as the holder. The main skill involved in holding is catching, why not use a receiver? Think Miami might try that next week?
He throws passes to the tight end. He has a fullback named Asaph Schwapp. How can you not love that name? He throws passes to his fullbacks, even. Somewhere, Pat Haden got an erection watching the game when Brady Quinn faked a screen to the left and threw back to his right to the fullback who was getting lonely on the far side of the field. Haden is convinced that on every play, every game the fullback is open. USC beat the Irish in South Bend a couple years ago (more than a couple, I guess) when Sunny Byrd caught like 27 passes out of the backfield.
Now if Charlie takes my suggestion and uses a defensive back as the “safety” in the QB kneel formation at the end of a game, I can die happy.
Doesn’t that make sense? When teams line up to take a knee to end the game, especially if the lead is seven points or less, they always put a guy 20 yards behind the line of scrimmage in case Joe Pisarchik shows up to play QB and fumble it away. Why don’t they use a defensive back, somebody used to tackling, instead of a wide receiver? This has never made sense to me.
Lou Holtz used to use Jeff Burris back there, which is as close as I’ve ever seen a coach come to treating it like a defensive play, but Burris wasn’t just ND’s best safety, he also lined up at running back about 10 times a game. Oh, well.
So how good are the Irish? They’re better than most people thought, but there’s a reason Ty Willingham got shown the door. The talent level is down, and he seemed reserved to the idea that the couldn’t get very many “great” players at ND. So they’ll scratch and claw and fight, but don’t be surprised if they come back from Ann Arbor on Saturday holding their asses, which have just been handed to them by Michigan.
The one real advantage they have is that some of their toughest games (Pitt, Michigan, Purdue and Tennessee) feature coaches who always do at least one really dumb thing in every game. There’s a reason both Bob Davie and Ty Willingham have wins over Lloyd Carr and Joe Tiller, and Willingham even went to Tennessee and beat Fullmer last year. So we’ll see how things work out.
NIU didn’t embarass themselves in the Big House last weekend, and Garrett Wolfe showed a regional TV audience that he’s pretty damn good, but Michigan still hardly broke a sweat in a 33-17 win. So in a lot of ways we don’t know any more about the Wolverines than we do the Irish.
