Navy Duds and Studs

I feel like with all of the negative fan criticism towards Weis stemming from the loss that I should add my two cents on how this loss affects Weis' job security before launching into the weekly Duds and Studs segment.

Effect: The defense is a major point of concern. Yes, we let Navy dominate us on the ground and let them score 23 points. However, even with a shutout against Nevada, our team is giving up 29 points a game, so the Navy performance can almost be viewed more as a continuing trend than anything new.

Cause: Everyone knows by now that Weis is an offensive coach, but as a head coach, he still must be held accountable for the defense. The poor performance of the defense this season leads me to believe that A) Weis does not understand defense enough to be a head coach, or B) Weis has not done a good job of hiring and promoting his defensive coaching staff

Effect: With two All-American receivers and a (former) Heisman candidate quarterback, our offense was shut out in the first half and managed only 21 points.

Cause: I am actually going to give Charlie a pass here. His offensive game plan lit Navy up for over 500 total yards, and we gained as many first downs as we did against a hapless Washington State. The missed opportunities while going 2-6 inside the red zone seemed to be more the fault of the players than the coaching. Weis is a damn good offensive coach.

Verdict: Weis has three games left, and he must win out to keep his job. Our last win against a ranked opponent was in 2006 against Penn State, and we were favorites in that game. Losing to Pitt next week would cement the idea that Weis' teams cannot win against anyone ranked higher than them, which is unacceptable. Losing to UConn or Stanford (both of which are having good years) cements the idea that Weis' teams play down to (on paper) inferior opponents, which is unacceptable.

Now for what I'm sure everyone really came to read:

Duds

Excise Police: On a weekend where there is so many football related issues to talk about, I'm not going to spend too much time here, but the same week Notre Dame sponsored an event for off campus students to learn how to live safely in the dangerous city of South Bend, the Indiana State Excise Police broke up a party thrown by my friends only to ticket 2 younger siblings that were visiting for the weekend. Great use of resources.

Sergio Brown / Robert Blanton / Harrison Smith: Our defensive backfield has had issues all season, but this was one of the more frustrating performances. I'm not sure if Sergio took one step downfield to stop the run as he was content catching the fullback after ten yard gains instead of proactively trying to hit someone. Blanton's showboating after big plays is really starting to irritate me. Against Washington State, he was able to tip down the only deep ball thrown at him, but his celebration seemed unwarranted considering that a better ball would have resulted in an 80 yard touchdown. Similarly against Navy, RJ was heavily lobbying that the receiver should have been down at the 1 after he missed an assignment that resulted in a touchdown; just get off the field and get the next play right. This paragraph is getting kind of long so I'll let Brawling Hibernian comment on Smith.
Remember Washington?: This time Notre Dame was unable to get points in the red zone as missed field goals and turnovers inside the 20 negated an otherwise stellar performance by the offense. Credit Navy for standing strong when it counted, but one, if not both of our turnovers, were more mental errors than great plays by Navy, so this blame really goes on the players.

Coaching: The offense was great, but the defense was hard to watch. We gave up 348 yards on the ground because our coaching staff was not able to make adjustments. Our DBs were not prepared to defend the one pass that hurt us. Most importantly though, is that down 2 touchdowns with 12 minutes to go in the game, our entire sideline looked like they would rather be sitting in an Accounting class. In the NFL, its hard to tell someone who's making millions of dollars a year to yell; in college ball, it should be easy, but yet not one of our coaches made an effort to motivate the sidelines during the game. Maybe the cliche of coming out flat was why we couldn't score in the first half or why we couldn't make stops when we needed to. To me, this is my single biggest knock on Charlie Weis' teams; it is too hard to get them excited unless the game is in its final minutes.

Studs

Clausen / Floyd: I have to put them in here for the stats. Jimmy ran off 452 passing yards and Floyd grabbed a game high 141 receiving yards to go along with his touchdown. Even though Floyd had a few big drops, you have to applaud the guy's ability to come back after an injury with such a big game. Jimmy almost found himself in the Duds column this week for his two turnovers and poor reads in the fourth quarter. This is probably overstepping my bounds as I don't know what was going on after Clausen's fumble, but I can tell you that it reinforced every negative stereotype about Clausen when he laid on the ground showing off his injury after the fumble.

Tate: 9 catches for 132 and a touchdown. Also made a great play on the onside kick to give us a chance to win. After Clausen missed on his fourth consecutive first down fade to Floyd in the fourth quarter, a student next to me lamented about Floyd's return, complaining that now less passes will get thrown to Golden.

David Ruffer: The kickoff specialist gave Notre Dame it's first touchback in a long time.

Bye Week: At least I didn't have to watch my Browns lose this weekend, too. If Notre Dame decides to cut ties with Charlie at the end of the year, the school might learn a lesson from the Browns, who have found a comfortable place in the cellar of the AFC North behind two former Belicheck coaches in Romeo Crennel and Eric Mangini (who we inexplicably hired after he was fired from the Jets). Our next coach should be proven, either with BCS appearances in college or with rings in the NFL. Notre Dame should be an attractive coaching job, and we need to stop trying to find the next breakout coach and make a hire with less risk.

That's it for the Duds and Studs segment. Go Irish! Get a freakin good win, please!

Photos from the AP.

Case of the Mondays

The first Monday fully removed from ND's football season has undoubtedly left some of our loyal readers in a head-pounding Duds and Studs withdrawal, so the crew thought that it would be helpful to post something today, even if it is just a vain attempt to fill a void that likely won't be satisfied until after the San Diego State game.

While perusing NDLNA, I came across a decent writeup by MSNBC.com analyst Eric Hanse, which points out some highs and lows of the season. Hanse found some silver lining in the season both in the play of freshmen nose tackle Ian Williams and wideout Duval Kamara, and the statistical improvement of the defense from 2006 to 2007 is also worth taking a look at. Regarding Kamara, BlueandGold.com came up with a cumulative playing time chart for the season, and #18 was able to log the most playing time for a freshman receiver since Rocket Ismail on the 1988 squad. It's worth noting the presence of underclassmen that are either at or near the top of their position; hopefully these young players can build off of the quantity of experience they were able to get this year and use it to better prepare for next season.

The Charlie's Nasties crew always tries to present a fair and unbiased opinion whenever possible, so in order to attempt to do so, I give you this article defending the Nasties crew's favorite scapegoat, John Latina. Our friends at the Irish Roundup offer several factors out of the realm of John's control that have negatively contributed to the offensive line's performance over the last three years, and the post suggests that Irish Nation should (like the case with Weis) hold off on passing judgement until he is given another year to redeem himself. In my mind, however, a good coach is able to fix the type of problems (missed assignments, inability to adjust to defenses) that have plagued the line this year, and I am still blown away that Chris Stewart went unnoticed and unused for the first half of the season. I mean, come on, looking at this picture, doesn't one player kind of, um... stick out as possessing some good physical traits for excelling at the right tackle position?


Anyway, the point is that a player shouldn't have to threaten to transfer to see some playing time. I know that sometimes players perform differently in practice than in games, but when the team opens the first three games struggling to net positive rushing yards, then there's not really any excuse for not giving the bottom of the depth chart some opportunity.

In other news, if you haven't noticed yet, the Nasties crew has finally sold out. Contract negotiations with Brugg and the Golden Boy have resurfaced and have been proceeding amicably up to this point, but it looks like the site is going to need to generate some revenue to put up with their demands. So if you like what you read around here, I encourage you to support us by checking out the ads in the right column of the page. With the holiday season fast approaching, it never hurts to find some nice ND apparel online.

This picture is seriously from one of the ad sites.

Lastly, a quick congratulations to the men's bball team for a nice win over Eastern Michigan last weekend. I have a film screening in the DPAC tomorrow night during the Kansas State game (which will be played at the Madison Square Garden), but you can bet that they'll be at least one laptop in the theatre pulling up a gamecast.

Go Irish! Beat Wildcats!

Fire Weis?

While I was perusing ESPN.com when I was supposed to be listening to a lecture on Microsoft Access, I came across an interesting Gene Wojciechowski article about Charlie Weis and Notre Dame. The article wasn't interesting because it addressed the age old Weis - Willingham comparison, but because it talked about fans turning their backs on the coach:

"Notre Dame alums and fans feel empowered by the precedent set when Willingham was dismissed. [. . .] Some of them want a new coach."

Over the last week, Charlie undoubtedly took some heat (even from the Nasties crew) for (among other decisions) not kicking the field goal against Navy, but I have yet to hear any students on campus challenging his job position. The ND blog roll also appears to be responding the same way, by criticizing the coaching, but not necessarily the coach.

"Weis is going to have to live with the "Fire Charlie" chatter"

Even though this season is breaking all sorts of bad records (only two other Irish teams have lost 8 games in a season), I feel that our fan base has been smart enough to tough out this season knowing, not hoping, that things will get better quickly. The reason ND locked up Weis with a big contract so early is that when he is given the talent to work with, the results have been two BCS bowl bids, and once this current Irish squad develops in terms of skill and experience, fans expect nothing less than a perennial championship contender.

Wojciechowski also was critical of Weis' recruiting, basically saying that even though his classes have been ranked very highly, it doesn't matter because high school player rankings can be so wildly inaccurate. On this point, I'd like to refer this professional ESPN writer to the research done over at the Blue-Gray Sky, where over the summer, the boys reviewed the high school rankings of the current college seniors and compared them to their on field performance, and here are some of the conclusions they found:

• 30% of the top 50 seemed capable of playing in the NFL after only 3 years of school
• Only 10% of the top 50 were considered true "busts"
• Purdue's top 50 players seem to bust more than others (just a fun fact)

Also interesting was that the BGS team found that the hardest positions to evaluate were the offensive line and cornerback positions, so I guess that the ranking of the upcoming class could be somewhat skewed given that it contains 7 o-linemen and DBs, but the point is that a top ranking seems to be a decent predictor of college success. Oh, and by the way, the #1 ranked player of the 2008 class just set a single game rushing record in the NFL. I think his name's Peterson or something like that.

Up to this point, I haven't been sucked into comparing Weis and Willingham at all. Actually, I think this might be the first time I wrote the word "Willingham" in a post. But given that I am criticising an article that discusses him, I think I should at least say something on the issue. Well, I'm not going to, but I will point our loyal readers to a Huskie blog (link courtesy of Her Loyal Sons) so they can see how they are doing with our former head coach.

The ESPN article also includes a very good video of Mark May and Lou Holtz breaking down Notre Dame. Lou talked about how Notre Dame needs to get back to the fundamentals of toughness and good technique; Weis seems to have had some difficulty with this in the 07 season, and my only rational for it is that he is used to coaching experienced players, but not yet used to developing inexperienced players. One of May's criticisms was that Charlie has been unable to translate the recruiting rankings onto the field, so hopefully Chuck can prove him wrong as he learns how to better deal with youngsters.

Commenting on the loss to Navy, Lou referred to the 1987 team that lost in the Sugar Bowl, saying that that loss was able to fuel the team over the offseason and allowed them to go after the championship the next year. I personally believe that ND has faced enough "adversity" between getting walloped in its last two bowl games, getting hammered by USC in four out of the last five contests, and losing a record eight games this season, but if snapping the 43 year old winning streak against Navy ends up being the catalyst that leads to future success, I'll take it for now. This leaves us with the quote of the week:

"[losing to Navy] could be the best thing that happens to [Notre Dame]" - Lou Holtz

When life gives you lemons... Beat Falcons!