Offensive Struggles Lead to Weis' Fall

STANFORD, Calif. -- Should Charlie Weis be terminated as the head coach at Notre Dame this week (that's not a question, by the way, it's an introductory clause), observers will be quick to blame the team's chronically lackluster defense as being responsible for his demise. Granted, there has never been a third-and-long that an Irish opponent was unable to convert -- especially late in the fourth quarter -- during the Weis era.

This season, though, another factor has been in play and on the opposite side of the ball. In short, Notre Dame's crunch-time offense delivered just 20 percent of the time.

The Irish, as you are aware, never lost a game by more than seven points this year. They played 10 coin-flip contests, basically, finishing 4-6 in those games. Blame the defense if you want, but in eight of those 10 games the offense had a chance to either win the game or run out the clock and failed. Allow me to enumerate:

-- At Michigan and against Michigan State at home, Notre Dame had the lead and the ball in the closing minutes and both times failed to make a critical first down. In both games, in fact, they ran the same third-and-long pass (throwing, inexplicably, to inexperienced wideouts Shaquelle Evans and John Goodman, respectively). The defense bailed out the team against the Spartans via Kyle McCarthy's interception, but did not do so in Ann Arbor.

-- The closing drive against USC was impressive, but the bottom line is that the Irish had first-and-goal against the Trojans and failed.

-- Against Boston College the Irish got the ball with a four-point lead with 4:23 remaining and promptly went three-and-out, gaining a net of two yards and draining only 1:01 from the clock. Brian Smith's interception saved that game for the Irish.

-- Navy? A potential game-winning drive begins on the Irish with 1:48 to play on the Irish 13. Two incomplete passes and two sacks later, Jimmy Clausen has been sacked in the end zone for a safety.

-- Pittsburgh. A 15-yard chop block penalty is followed by a game-clinching fumble by Clausen.

-- Connecticut. Armando Allen fumbles and the Irish lose possession on the potential game-winning drive.

-- Stanford. With the score tied 38-38 and just over six minutes remaining, Weis makes a conservative call for Robert Hughes on 3rd-and-2. The play goes nowhere and Notre Dame must punt from its own 35.

On consecutive Saturdays early in the season, Clausen led the Irish on go-ahead drives late in the game at Purdue and versus Washington. That's two saves for the offense. But the defense saved just as many games via the interceptions against Michigan State and Boston College. As potent and spectacular as the Irish offense can be, it failed to deliver eight times out of 10 when the game was on the line this season.

Part of that is execution and part of it is conservative play-calling by the head coach. Notice that when Stanford faced its most critical play of the game, a fourth-and-4 from the Irish 18, Jim Harbaugh called for the nation's best running back to toss an option pass. That took cojones, and had it failed Harbaugh might be this week's Bill Belichick.

Ten games should not have come down to the wire, you say, and that is true. But if a Notre Dame offense packed with talent had executed its most crucial offensive drives just half the time, the Irish are 9-3 and this coach is not going anywhere. Notre Dame's offense never recovered that winning touch after its failure versus USC.

Just as a different outcome in 2005 versus the Trojans might have created an entirely different environment in South Bend for Weis, a different one in '09 versus the Trojans would have completely altered the confidence level of this team, of this offense. In football, fates change on just a play or two.

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During the season-ending four-game losing streak, the Irish defense accumulated a total of three sacks. Defensive tackles Kapron Lewis-Moore and Ethan Johnson scored sacks versus Navy and Connecticut, respectively (the other one came on a blitz by Sergio Brown against Stanford). The Irish did not record a sack versus Boston College.

Not including Washington State -- an FCS-level team in terms of talent -- an Irish defensive end has not recorded a sack since John Ryan made a key fourth-quarter sack against USC. That was literally half a season ago.

If you've either read or seen "The Blind Side", you know that the defensive end position is considered by many the most important position outside quarterback in football. And the 2009 Irish simply did not have a player at that position.

If Chris Martin, the five-star DE recruit who verbally committed to the Irish last February but now seems headed elsewhere, were a free agent, he would start from the moment he stepped on campus next season.

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In an article by Eric Hansen of the South Bend Tribune that appeared a couple of days ago, a scout described senior safety Kyle McCarthy as "a poor man's Tom Zbikowski."

I'll take that one on. Zibby was more of a playmaker and he did some amazing things on punt returns, but McCarthy (pictured, right) has been an invaluable member of the defense for two seasons now. Not only did he lead the Irish in tackles the past two seasons, McCarthy also became the first Irish defensive player to amass more than 100 tackles in consecutive seasons (110 in '08 and 101 in '09) since All-America linebacker Bob Crable did so from 1979-81.

Linebackers Tony Furjanic and Ned Bolcar each had a pair of 100-plus tackle seasons in the 1980s, but neither did so in consecutive years.

McCarthy also led the team in interceptions. Moreover, he is the type of mature, no-nonsense person on and off the field around which winning teams are built. Manti Te'o is a similar persona. It's not a geography thing and it's not an ethnicity thing, as the dual examples of McCarthy and Te'o demonstrate.

Maybe Tom Zbikowski was simply a poor man's Kyle McCarthy.

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If the Irish do not attend a bowl, Jimmy Clausen finishes his season with 28 touchdown passes and just four interceptions having faced only BCS-conference defenses. I may quibble with some of Clausen's intangible traits and transgressions -- hearing Hannah Storm use the term "sucker-punch" on the Sunday a.m. SportsCenter was a brutal reminder of how lazy reporting can be, even at the supposed highest levels -- but he is an outstanding passer.

Only Brady Quinn threw more touchdowns in a single season in Irish history, but Quinn's best TD:INT ratio was just above 6:1 (he threw a school-record 37 TD passes in 2006 and seven interceptions). Clausen's was 7:1 this season.

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Field-goal kicking had been a perennial problem at Notre Dame during the Weis era (perhaps you recall the 2007 Navy contest), but not so in 2009. Freshman Nick Tausch and senior David Ruffer, the latter a walk-on whose bio does not even appear in the media guide, combined to go 19-of-22 this season. That's an 86.3 percent success rate, second only to John Carney's 89.5 percent in 1984 -- and Carney did OK for himself in his future endeavors.

Ruffer, by the way, finished 5-of-5. Tausch, who suffered mysterious injuries during pre-game warm-ups before both the Pitt and UConn games before not even traveling to Palo Alto, was 14-of-17.

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Golden Tate is an exemplary wideout -- if the Irish finish 9-3, I don't see how he is not at least invited to the Heisman ceremony -- and an equally candid interview. After last night's loss he noted that other factors besides just dollars will play into his decision as to whether or not to go pro.

"I'm looking at who the coach will be," said Tate, a junior, "who the quarterback will be, and my family, getting a college degree is very important."

Tate is on pace to graduate next December. As high as his stock has risen the past three months -- he crushed Jeff Samardzija's single-season catches and receiving yardage marks -- he is more likely to return for a senior season than Clausen. Unlikely, but more likely.

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Whoever is coaching the Irish next season would do well to have offensive line coach Frank Verducci, wide receivers coach Rob Ianello and tight ends coach Bennie Parmalee on his staff.

Weis, by the way, is credited with developing quarterbacks and rightly so. But he, Ianello and Parmalee have done even better sending receivers to the NFL. Tight ends Anthony Fasano, John Carlson and (in a few years) Kyle Rudolph all do or will inhabit NFL rosters, as do/will wideouts Maurice Stovall, Tate and Michael Floyd. Samardzija would be a starter in the NFL had he not chosen baseball.

That's seven receivers in five seasons.


One more reason that Weis, should he be fired, will be miserable. His son, Charlie Jr., will be a senior in high school next year.

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ESPN's Adam Schefter, an old friend, is reporting that six NFL teams have contacted Weis about working for them. It's good to know that my old pal knows how to read online stories published on this site.

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Agree wholeheartedly with Andy Staples' piece on the Irish that can currently be found on SI.com. Kirk Herbstreit is correct, there is entirely too much blather about the Irish currently. But Chris Fowler is also correct in stating that the Notre Dame mystique is something, whether you like it or not, that will not soon vanish.

Look at it this way. ESPN led off its Sunday 10 a.m. "SportsCenter" with a story on Charlie Weis' future and a live report from South Bend -- even though no Irish players or coaches will be available today -- by George Smith.

A few segments later, Brent Musberger and Herbstreit weighed in on the topic.

Now think about this: Both Notre Dame and Florida State finished 6-6 this season. The Seminoles have won two national championships in the past quarter-century and the Irish one. The Seminoles' head coach, whose job is also in jeopardy, is No. 2 all-time in terms of victories in the FBS. Bobby Bowden is both a legend and an inductee in the College Football Hall of Fame.

And ESPN barely mentioned his situation. And they definitely did not dispatch a correspondent to Tallahassee for a live report.

According to some cursory research on my part, there are at least five world religions with a greater number of followers than Judaism. But would you ever say, in terms of western civilization, that the Jewish religion ranks sixth in terms of attention and influence?

I am not being flippant. Judaism demands more attention because, well, the Jews were here first and their history has had such a profound impact on all western religions. Likewise, when college football became the sensation it did -- in the Twenties -- no school was more responsible for that development.

Does that mean the Irish are supposed to be a top-10 team in the 21st century? Not necessarily. But to simply aver that Notre Dame is no different in terms of cultural relevance than Florida State or, say, Miami, is to show a lack of understanding of why some brands are iconic and others are not.