Posted on 12/02/2001 6:49:16 PM PST by jimkress
Every off-season, no matter the sport, isn’t properly underway until someone conducts the ritual of throwing out the first coach. With Sunday’s excommunication of Bob Davie, Notre Dame did just that, in the process earning the right to say for the first time in a long time, “We’re Number One.”
We weren't privy to exactly how it went down in the Notre Dame athletic department, but we can only hope that Davie found the door more quickly than his teams have found the end zone during his lackluster tenure as head coach of the nation’s most legendary college football team. With more luck, he wasn’t penalized 15-yards for unsportsmanlike conduct on the way out and have to look for it again.
At the beginning of this most pathetic of Notre Dame seasons, I said that the Fighting Celtic Ethnic Group (I don’t want to offend anyone’s sensibilities.) had reached that point of academic excellence where it would no longer contend for a National Championship, the school’s insistence on its players being able to count past “hut two” having hamstrung its ability to recruit the sort of players who run the regular season table. I still believe that, and the new coach is going to have to realize that.
That said, Notre Dame has no reason and no excuse to settle for the sort of sloppy football inflicted on it by the reign of Davie, who did what he could to put a perverse twist on the old quote always attributed incorrectly to Vince Lombardi. With Davie, winning wasn’t everything. In fact, it barely showed up on the radar screen.
Notre Dame can be competitive. Even Davie wrung a 9-2 season out of talent that produced only one first-round draft choice during his tenure. But that 2000 season that saw his team earn a BCS bowl bid — where it was trounced roundly, squarely, and trapezoidally — showed that Davie never had the right stuff to coach Notre Dame. He was pathologically fervent, give him that. But even though the lights burned fiercely in the house of Davie, you never felt certain that anyone was home. Once you got past his earnestness, there wasn’t a whole lot else.
A Notre Dame coach has to have an outsized personality. Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, and Ara Parseghian were legends off the field as well as on. Lou Holz, the head weasel who preceded Davie, would not have lasted half his tenure without a personality that hid his inability to build a team around the talents of his players. Davie had the personality of a folding chair.
That alone was enough to mark him as a future ex-coach the day he took the job. That he lasted this long is a testament not to his abilities, but to the patience of the Notre Dame Athletic Department.
But Davie lost his job, as all coaches must, on the field. His biggest sin, obvious in his rookie season as it was in his last, was his inability to put a disciplined team on the field. Good teams don’t make dumb mistakes, and dumb mistakes were the only thing his teams ever managed to produce with any consistency. Early on, he lost a big game to Michigan because of an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty for the sort of end zone celebration that would be embarrassing even at Miami. He kept saying he’d eliminate the mistakes. He never did. And while the flags were thrown on players, the person to blame was the coach. No Notre Dame team since the lovable but comically incompetent Gerry Faust ever beat itself as often as did Davie’s teams.
I don’t know who the next coach will be, but it had better be someone with style and flair and charisma. Tom Coughlin would do the job. Someone who would do it better, but may not be available, is Rick Neuheisel of Washington, a personal favorite of the new athletic director Kevin White.
The candidates are out there. What Notre Dame doesn’t need, though, is another earnest worker like Davie. It needs someone who can walk into a recruit’s home and charm the hair off the family’s pet fox terrier, someone who can inspire flights of heroic prose from the media, someone who fills lecture halls for his off-season motivational chats, someone who can create an exciting offense and determined defense, and, not least, someone who can take a team with exceptional intelligence, and teach it to play fundamentally sound football.
Davie did none of the above and so he’s gone. He was not a bad person, but at Notre Dame, he will not be missed.
Tell that to Joe Moore, the people Davie slandared during the trial, and the players whose lives were ruined because Davie didn't bother to check reports they were violating NCAA rules with a ND booster.
he will not be missed
With that I can agree.
ND is one of two Catholic schools that have Div 1-A football programs.
There is the best: Boston College
And the 2nd best: ND
Whatever!!
NCAA Division 1-A football is the biggest crock in sports. It is the only major championship whose participants are chosen not by competition and elimination, but by a vote. The rankings are arbitrary, unfair, and congenitally nonsensical. Figure skating is more legitimate.
Some quick examples: Nebraska (another school with outrageously obsessed fans), which was ranked first on Thanksgiving Day, could credibly be the winner of a national championship playoff. However, they most likely won't get the chance to play in the fictional championship game in 2002 because they lost ONE GAME to then #14 Colorado. Even though CU pummeled Nebraska for its worst defeat in decades, Colorado was ranked #10 in the next poll. CU followed that shocking upset with a defeat of then #3 Texas for the Big 12 conference championship. So, after defeating #1 and #3, now where are they ranked? #5. Texas is now #10, but Nebraska is ranked #4 -- up from #6.
Colorado isn't even in the running for the mythical championship. If they had beaten Nebraska or Texas in a playoff, it might have meant something for them. Instead, all it probably means is that others beside Nebraska and Texas will play for the phony title, while Colorado likely will play in a bowl game that will be watched by CU fans, the fans of the other team, and just about no one else.
You would think this could only make sense to a bunch of phys ed majors with 2.0 GPAs. In fact, it is the work of computer geeks hired by TV networks and college bigwigs to ensure that the current corrupt system will remain greatly intact despite calls for reform.
The NCAA has lower divisions of college football, and those championships are decided on the field, not by a poll. And the players in those championships have the added pressure of having to earn a degree, since they likely will never draw a paycheck playing professionally.
I refuse to acknowledge college football until they have a legitimate playoff system.
You ND fans have to stop living in the past.
ND will NEVER be as dominant in football as it was 1930's thru 1970's. That is not all bad. I admire ND for attempting to field strong football teams and maintain high academic standards for the players, but it means ND will find it very difficult if not impossible to win national championships.
Face it, the aura of the ND football program has faded and it faces stiff competition from other schools that boast comparable athletic and academic prestige, including Stanford, Northwestern, Michigan, and BC, among others.
Colorado is to blame for its ranking though. Two things you left out of your otherwise gorgeous rant:
8-26-2001 Colorado 22 Fresno State 22
10-20-2001 Colorado 7 Texas 41
Yeah, I know, I was just being sarcastic. Having fallen now from their prior status, if someone asked "Who is Notre Dame" in reference to football, you wouldn't be surprised.
Yeah, I know, I was just being sarcastic. Having fallen now from their prior status, if someone asked "Who is Notre Dame" in reference to football, you wouldn't be surprised.
At least at Notre Dame we know how to spell choir ...
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