All Hope Is Gone for Weis, Rodriguez

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Outside Notre Dame Stadium, where Touchdown Jesus is considering whether to hold his nose and wear a brown bag over his head, a student waved two tickets at anyone who walked past. "Freebies. Who wants free tickets?'' he hawked Saturday.

There were no takers.

"After we lost to Navy,'' he said, "everyone gave up.''

Juxtapose that scene against one inside the famed bowl, where Charlie Weis did something we'd never seen him do. Locked arm-in-arm with his 33 seniors, who were playing their final home game, he wept openly as they emerged from the tunnel and walked onto the field. Weis initially was standing in the back, wanting the seniors to have their day, when he was told to join them at the front. This was their show of support for a man about to lose yet another maddening game -- and, ultimately, his job as Notre Dame coach.

"They said, 'We're walking out together.' I had no idea they were going to do that,'' said Weis, still visibly moved after the 33-30 overtime loss to Connecticut. "I'm pretty emotional. I just try not to let (the media) see it. The fact they wanted me to do this and they wanted me up there, that meant a lot to me. I'm really proud of those kids and I'm really disappointed for them.''

Said senior center Eric Olsen, who organized the Weis tribute: "We wanted to show that we're behind our coach 100 percent. It was very emotional. No one takes more heat than Coach Weis, and he's the one who sticks his neck out for us.''

The tears seemed to confirm the inevitable, that Weis will be fired at month's end after a failed tenure at the university he loves. Once the ND athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, confirmed last week that the whopping amount of Weis' buyout -- reportedly, as high as $18 million -- won't be a factor in a coaching change, the focus shifted from Weis' future to his potential replacement. Weis may be many things, but he is not naive. He's a Dead Hoodie Walking, waiting for the huge paycheck and the best NFL offensive coordinator's position available, perhaps back in New England, where he can fetch coffee for a finished product named Tom Brady.

The Weis Guy now has lost 20 games in 26 months, dating to the start of the 2007 season, after a typically chaotic, heartbreaking loss to UConn, a better-coached program in just its seventh year of big-time college football. Weis is now 35-26 in South Bend, a worse winning percentage than both of his direct predecessors, Tyrone Willingham and Bob Davie. If they were fired, how does Notre Dame possibly keep Weis?

"Today is not the day for me to reflect on things like that,'' Weis said. "Today is the day for me to worry about those 33 (seniors). I feel absolutely miserable for them. I've never been a hypocrite, and if I come in here and start talking about me, I'm barking up the wrong tree. I'll worry about me tomorrow. Today, I should be worrying about them.

"I feel miserable,'' he went on. "No one cares more about these kids, short term and long term, than me. I worry about them in their lives, which is part of this job right here. I just talked to them about trials and tribulations in life, the ups and downs. You're gonna have lows like today; that's how life goes. When you come to Notre Dame, you're just an 18-year-old kid who thinks you have all the answers. When you leave, you leave as a young man ready to face the real world. Some of them will go to the NFL, some won't, and they'll go get jobs with University of Notre Dame degrees. There's a lot of guys who are very emotional right now.''

Even as the Irish were receiving leprechaun breaks -- a missed field goal that would have won the game in regulation, two touchdown runs nullified by holding penalties (one a rotten call), an interception in the end zone -- they still lost. Even though Weis is blessed with a future NFL quarterback in Jimmy Clausen and future NFL receivers in Michael Floyd and Golden Tate, they couldn't outscore a team led by a quarterback, Zach Frazer, who transferred from ND because Clausen was entrenched as the golden-boy starter and Weis didn't think Frazer could play. Weis talked to him afterward and congratulated him, knowing the UConn players have been through hell after the Oct. 18 stabbing death of teammate Jasper Howard. For all the pain connected with losing games or even jobs, it obviously can't compare to the loss of a human being. Since the murder, the Huskies have been trying to win one for Howard. Finally, at storied Notre Dame, they pulled it off.

"Now we can take a game and ball and send it down to the Howard family,'' said UConn coach Randy Edsall, whose eyes also were watering. "I know that little No. 6 was looking down on us all day and praying for us. To play in this stadium, with this history and tradition, and to be in our seventh year as an FBS school -- it's just a remarkable feat by those young men. It's our biggest and best win in our short time.''

Consumed by emotion, Edsall also made a comment that wasn't intended to slight Notre Dame but probably did. "Our kids are happy, but they expected to win,'' he said. "To me, it wasn't an upset, and it wasn't an upset to our kids. We knew we could win if we executed. It wasn't off the charts. They were excited, but not surprised.'' Imagine if I'd said 25 years ago that Connecticut would win a football game at Notre Dame -- and it wouldn't be considered an upset.

Might Edsall be an ideal coaching candidate at ND, by the way, after three Edsels?

In a college football context, it's almost apocalyptic that Notre Dame and Michigan, formerly two of the sport's biggest brand names, would find themselves in utter disarray as the 2009 regular season closes. But there's no way to mask the reality that Weis and Rich Rodriguez, the Michigan coach, cannot remain in their jobs. Their situations are quite different -- Weis runs a clean program with a 96-percent graduation rate, but has yet to prove in five years that he can win big games, build a credible defense and reach a Bowl Championship Series game; Rodriguez is engulfed in messes, with the possibility of NCAA probation looming as large as his 16 losses in two years, including two to an arch-rival, Ohio State, that has beaten Michigan six straight times.

"I'm tired of being humbled,'' Rodriguez said after a 21-10 loss to the Buckeyes, which made him the first Michigan coach to lose his first two games to Ohio State.

With fans waving anti-Rodriguez banners in the Big House, doesn't he worry about losing his job?



"No,'' he said, a bit too quickly.

Their traditions are as colossal as their fight songs are world-famous. Which is all the more reason why coaches who don't match the immense expectations, after signing on for the rough duty, must be fired quicker than stragglers at other programs. In two years, Rodriguez has frittered away four decades of Michigan excellence with chaos on the field and negligence off it. It's unthinkable that the overseer of college football's winningest program would be accused of overpracticing his players, only to compound the problems by failing to file monthly forms tracking the practice time. This is a monumental issue, because if the NCAA finds that Rodriguez violated rules by working the players too long, he conceivably could be fired for cause. Details of his Michigan contract allow for the firing if he commits a major violation of NCAA rules. A dismissal would be "without liability to Rodriguez,'' according to the contract, worth $2.5 million a season over six years and signed in October 2008.

After a regressing quarterback, Tate Forcier, threw four interceptions and fumbled once Saturday in a 21-10 loss, athletic director Bill Martin was asked by an ABC reporter if he was prepared to fire Rodriguez. He laughed. Doesn't Martin realize we've been laughing at Michigan the last two years? Then again, he's the guy who recently bullied his way past two college students working security on the Regents Guest level of Michigan Stadium. In separate incidents, Martin paid no regard for new security initiatives, allegedly putting his hand on the chest of employee Arif Kahn and saying, "I am the athletic director, I can go in.'' He also was alleged to have pushed the shoulder of another employee, Jackie Turner, while telling her, "Honey, I am the athletic director.'' A few days later, Martin announced he would retire next September. So even if he does support Rich-Rod, who has finished a combined 2-14 in the month of October and November, it may be a brief reprieve.

"We're in a transition and we all have to be prepared to stay the course," Martin told the Associated Press earlier this week. "Is our record a surprise? Sure. Do I totally support Rich? Absolutely. You don't want to make excuses, but take a look at our personnel. We have only 71 players who came here on scholarship. We've got freshman going against fifth-year seniors in a lot of places.''

Swarbrick, meanwhile, said his Weis decision will be based more on "art than science,'' whatever that means. Art would be falling prey to the way some Notre Dame players have rallied around Weis. Science would be looking at the numbers and the maddening way the Irish lose games under Weis. Truth be told, Swarbrick already is doing his due diligence on candidates, and it should shock no one if Bob Stoops is introduced, sooner than later, at a campus news conference. Stoops has topped out at Oklahoma, where his championship days are over and "Big Game Bob'' is 6-5 after a 41-13 stomping by Texas Tech. He meets the two major criteria -- Irish (check), Catholic (check) -- and he's an Ohio native whose recruiting tentacles will reach across the Midwest. Jon Gruden would have been my choice, but he has chosen to sign an extension at ESPN, where he'll keep providing precious Monday Night Football nuggets such as "Eric Mangini is a heck of a coach.''

And the idea of Urban Meyer leaving Florida seems a major stretch, even if he said last December that "Notre Dame is still my dream job'' and wrote in his biography of his Irish courtship in 2004, "I wanted to go to Notre Dame, but my family wanted to talk about going to Florida.'' The fallback candidate is Cincinnati's Brian Kelly, but while he's as Irish and Catholic and Midwestern as Stoops and has done a fantastic job at the Big East school, he still doesn't have the national cachet of Stoops.

Regardless of how the players support Weis, he's gone. "There are so many people involved in that decision, along with the administration. My opinion doesn't matter,'' Olsen said. Weis will coach his last game at Stanford next Saturday night. On the other sideline will be Jim Harbaugh, another hot up-and-comer who should be pursued by Notre Dame. It will be a sad night, yet Weis was the one who strutted into the job and talked boldly five years ago. "Right now, you're a 6-5 football team,'' he said then, with much more brass. "And guess what? It's just not good enough. It's not good enough for you, and it's not gonna be good enough for you. If you think they hired me to go 6-5, you've got the wrong guy.''

Today, Charlie Weis is a 6-5 football coach.