Time for Notre Dame to Sink USS Charlie

I'm not sure who's more hopelessly out of place: Charlie Weis on the Notre Dame sideline or Jon Gruden in the "Monday Night Football'' broadcast booth. But two wrongs easily can be righted in one spectacular swoop. The Domers need to swallow hard again, reach down for that big wallet, send away Weis with his $18 million buyout and hire Gruden as their next coach.

Because Navy just sank the USS Charlie.

In a dizzying age in college football, when anything's-possible intruders such as TCU and Cincinnati can crash the top five, the Fighting Irish continue to pass bad gas at the most inopportune times. A direct yellow brick road to a Bowl Championship Series bid is theirs annually, thanks to some wretched politics that no longer should exist, but once again, they've self-destructed and will settle for an inferior bowl. It's not only the crushing 23-21 home loss on Saturday, their second in three years to Navy after beating the Midshipmen a laughable 43 straight times, that has sealed Weis' fate in Year Five of his dismal tenure. It's what he said afterward -- tripe that supports the growing conclusion that he has been stealing money much too long.

Referring to the Irish's next game, at No. 8 Pittsburgh, The Weis Guy conceded that Notre Dame now is viewed as a patsy. "It's like the sacrificial lambs are rolling into town," he said, mentioning something about "spoiling (Pitt's) party.'' This was a hideous comment to make, of course, considering the program's distant but still-fabled glory, the continuing TV deal with NBC and Weis' huge contract. It's also a self-indictment, an admission by the coach that his program has dwindled to underdog status despite having unique built-in advantages. Hearing such talk, a Domer should be even more incensed than he already is.

"Right now (Pittsburgh) is the only thing you are chasing," Weis said. "You can't be worrying about two or three games down the line. You've got to worry about Pittsburgh, at 8 on Saturday night. Pittsburgh just ended up beating Syracuse soundly, and they're ready for their dog-and-pony show. It'll be the largest crowd in Heinz Field history. They're all ready for their major celebration when Notre Dame rolls into town."

It's the soundtrack of a beaten man, a coach who was a backup choice by an administration that swung and missed badly on the preferred candidate, Urban Meyer. Touchdown Jesus, meet Bad Loss Charlie. As it is, no one can tolerate his wretched, seven-game losing streak against top 10 opponents. But Weis keeps delivering similar clunkers against lesser foes, and the loss to Navy all but guarantees his dismissal in a few weeks. When he strutted onto campus with his three Super Bowl rings late in 2004, Weis announced, "Right now, you're a 6-5 football team, and guess what? That's just not good enough. That's not good enough for you, and it's certainly not going to be good enough for me." Well, at 6-3 with three potential losses ahead against the revived Panthers, an inspired Connecticut team, and No. 25 Stanford team, the Irish are looking at a 6-6 season, friends.

So if 6-6 isn't good enough for Weis -- who used to sit in the stands as a student and verbally critique the Irish himself -- then Weis isn't good enough for Notre Dame, either. If he loses at Pitt, his record will be 35-25, the same record Bob Davie had when he was dumped in 2001. Eerily, it would leave him with the same winning percentage (.583) that Ty Willingham had when he was fired in 2004. The athletic director has changed -- Kevin White out, Jack Swarbrick in -- but the standards and objectives haven't changed. Notre Dame wants to win national titles, and under Weis, the Irish are farther from the championship mix than they've been in eons. Sunday, he was asked how his team blew a BCS bid with a dynamic, maturing quarterback in Jimmy Clausen and big-time receivers in Golden Tate and Michael Floyd.

"Is the glass half full or is the glass half empty?" Weis shot back. "We lost three games by 13 points. But there are a lot of close wins that could have gone the other ways for us, too. I think we have some dynamic players on our team, but it still comes down to situational football. You still have to excel in situational football."

"They outschemed us, and I think they just played harder."
- Notre Dame nose guard Ian Williams on Navy And who should be held accountable for situational football? Attention to detail? That would be the head coach. Weis seemed to say as much, sort of, when asked how he'd handle the fallout of a devastating loss. "The whole theme this week is going to be about accountability and dependability," he said. "I can authoritatively get in front of these guys and say, 'OK, we want to talk about what happened,' and just go through the game. Without being just totally condescending and demeaning, let them know that -- 'You want to know why you lose? Here's why you lose,' and go right down the list. It's always easy, because I always start with me."

Good. Because everyone else is starting with Weis, too, including some of his own players. One glaring reason for the latest loss was Navy's rushing total: a whopping 348 yards, 158 by fullback Vince Murray. Weis and his third defensive coordinator, Jon Tenuta, foolishly used the same defensive scheme against the triple-option offense that they employed last year. The Midshipmen were ready. "I think the one thing that helped us, and I really hope this doesn't come across wrong, was last year, because we knew that they'd line up the same way," Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo said. "They did a great job against us last year defensively, so we had a pretty good clue that they were going to come back and do the same things as they did last year. We had a few things (planned).''

And those things worked. Not until the fourth quarter did Notre Dame's coaches adjust, and by then it was much too late. Nose guard Ian Williams criticized the staff, saying, "They outschemed us, and I think they just played harder." Realizing that strategy and effort fall under any coach's responsibility list, Weis wasn't pleased with Williams' potshot and volunteered that safety Kyle McCarthy had said scheme wasn't an issue. "There's a reason why one guy's a captain and one guy's not," Weis said. Not only does he look bad in sniping back at a 20-year-old speaking the truth, Weis missed the part of McCarthy's interview when he said, ``We just tried to do the same stuff as we did last year.''

Oops.

There also was talk of a concentration lapse -- again, the responsibility of the head coach. "There was a lot of talk this week on BCS bowl games, not from their team, but media (was) thinking about what BCS bowl game was coming up," Niumatalolo said. "I know Pitt is coming next week, and they're a phenomenal team, so we kind of felt like we had them in a perfect storm."

Which triggered a raging storm by fans on message boards and talk shows, demanding Weis' ouster. Even the South Bend Tribune, not to be confused with the New York Post for colorful opinions, went after Weis in the person of columnist Al Lesar, who called the Navy loss "a deal-breaker'' that "will be on the top of the pile come review time."
The review will come soon enough from Swarbrick and the higher-ups. And with it will come pleas from a long-frustrated fan base to hire Gruden, who would be able to recruit like Weis while, unlike Weis, hiring a coaching staff that would teach the game and game-plan correctly. Northwestern's Pat Fitzgerald, who just slayed Iowa over the weekend, has been mentioned for the position and would be far less expensive than Gruden. And get a load of this Fitzgerald zinger, from SI.com: "Even though we're similar academically, we're in a little different boat as Stanford and Notre Dame. We've been consistently winning since 1995. They're still saying they can do it, but we're doing it."

But while Notre Dame once did well in hiring a Northwestern man named Ara Parseghian, Fitzgerald doesn't have the cachet yet to match the enormous expectations. Gruden has the appropriate sizzle and years of head-coaching experience on the highest level, which Weis didn't have after riding the coattails of Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells. There also is a direct tie: Gruden attended high school in South Bend in the late '70s, when his father, Jim, was an ND assistant under Dan Devine. Gruden might want to remain in the NFL after his Tampa Bay dismissal, and there is sentiment in Chicago to hire him should the Bears wisen up and dump Lovie Smith. But some of the openings are so unattractive -- why would he want to work for Wacky Dan Snyder in Washington? -- that Gruden just might sign up for ND saviorship. As he and the rest of us know, any coach who turns around the program and wins a national championship will have a statue built for him at Notre Dame Stadium.

"I'm really respectful of the people that have those jobs," Gruden said of his job prospects. "I got a job. I just got fired from a job. I'm trying to hang on to the one I've got, man. I'm gonna stick to my guns here and do my job, and don't believe everything that's out there. Just do the best you can, finish the job that you have and that's what I'm gonna do.''

With Gruden's credibility, maybe Clausen stays another year. With Gruden's starpower, maybe NBC gets more bang for its buck. With Gruden's presence, maybe the most underachieving football program in humankind discards mediocrity and rises to its former prominence.

I even have a nickname for him: The Golden Dome.

Anything beats the USS Charlie.