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Notre Dame's task: Fighting the hype
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SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Charlie Weis talked politely for 45 minutes about his football team yesterday. But Notre Dame's second-year coach assured listeners that his vocabulary expands in the locker room and on the practice field.
"I use my New Jersey rhetoric," the Trenton native said yesterday.
He believes he needs to be "
much more demanding" this season - of players, coaches, even his star quarterback, Brady Quinn - because of all the hype surrounding the Irish.
The USA Today preseason coaches' poll, released last week, has Notre Dame tied with Southern Cal at No. 3 in the nation. Quinn is the early Heisman favorite. For yesterday's media day, reporters were in from Denver and Boston, New York and Kansas City. Yahoo.com's national sports columnist showed up. ESPN was taping.
For his players, Weis wants all the focus to be on opening opponent Georgia Tech on Sept. 2.
"I teach our players - and our coaches, for that matter - to be very shortsighted... . If I hear five guys telling you, 'Yeah, we're trying to win a national championship,' then I know I have a lot of work to do," Weis said.
So, Quinn, what's the goal this year?
"Big picture: national championship," Quinn answered without missing a beat. "We want to make a national championship a reality. We're just going to take one game at a time, but ultimately that's our goal."
Weis had talked of letdowns he had seen as an NFL assistant coach, how the New England Patriots did not make the playoffs the year after they won their first Super Bowl.
"Everybody got caught up in it and we had a bad year," Weis said.
"I always try to be truthful with everybody," a smiling Quinn said when told of the earlier words from his coach.
Weis won't have to lecture his quarterback, though. Quinn had this to say about Notre Dame's 9-3 season in 2005, when he set Irish records for completions, yardage and touchdown passes: "Last year was great, but we really didn't
do anything."
For all the success the Irish had on offense in 2005, their pass defense did not hold up. Ohio State's Troy Smith said after last season's Fiesta Bowl, a 34-20 Buckeyes victory over the Irish: "The scheming today was set up for us to make big plays."
Ohio State coach Jim Tressel piled on with more painful truth: "The one thing we talked about was we didn't want to overthrow the deep ones, because we knew they'd be open."
All that has been addressed here. It took 31 minutes for Quinn's name to leave his coach's lips yesterday. But in the first 10 minutes, Weis had this to say: "We're going to get more athletic on defense." And: "We're not going to get beat due to lack of team speed."
There was a lot of "research and evaluation" by all the coaches throughout the off-season, Weis said, on how to achieve this. Backup tailback and special-teams whiz Travis Thomas, a team captain, has been converted to a linebacker. Freshmen will get their chance if upperclassmen don't cut it. But Weis also believes part of the problem was the adjustment to a new system.
"I think we played slow sometimes," Weis said. "That doesn't mean we ran slow. Anybody who has to think about what to do - not just let it loose - is going to be hesitant."
As they begin practicing today, the Irish can look at their high national ranking as a burden or realize that starting high offers the surest path to finishing high. They won't have to worry about jumping over teams in the polls. They're already there.
Some of the early attention here comes because Notre Dame's schedule is front-loaded with difficulty. The Irish have three preseason-ranked opponents, and they play two in the first three weeks of the season - No. 19 Penn State on Sept. 9 and No. 15 Michigan on Sept. 16. Both games are at Notre Dame Stadium. Then the Irish will go all the way to Nov. 25 before playing Southern Cal in Los Angeles.
Die-hard Irish fans already know this: The school's ticket office, which holds a lottery for approximately 30,000 of the 80,795 seats for each game, had to return $11.7 million to fans who missed out on the lottery. That's up from $5.2 million in 2005.
Just for the Penn State game, there were 66,670 requests for those 30,000 tickets. Another 61,631 were requested for the Michigan game.
The high preseason ranking makes sense. And the other schools ranked in the top five all lost cornerstone players. No. 2 Texas lost the most indispensable player in the college game, Vince Young. Southern Cal lost two Heisman winners, Reggie Bush and Matt Leinart. No. 5 Oklahoma has Heisman contender Adrian Peterson at running back, but just lost promising quarterback Rhett Bomar, who was thrown off the team because of a car-dealership job at which he got paid for not working. Ohio State is top-ranked on merit, led by a pair of Heisman candidates in Smith and receiver Ted Ginn. But the Buckeyes also lost nine defensive starters and five first-rounders in this year's NFL draft.
Although Notre Dame lost just two draft choices and has 16 returning starters, it won't take long to figure out if the proclamation from Weis about his improved defense falls under hype or reality.
The coach knows the fallacy of solely looking at returning players on a roster and trying to determine how a season plays out.
"Sometimes experience can [be] a negative, not a positive," Weis said.
We heard that about the Fiesta Bowl too, how they couldn't get enough tickets. Come gameday we outnumbered them in the stands 60:40.
