Who Cares About Notre Dame Football?
Bill Long 9/29/07 A Case of Misplaced National Hand-wringing It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Notre Dame hired Charlie Weis, an accomplished offensive coordinator for several teams in the NFL, to be its head coach after impatiently ousting Tyrone Willingham near the end of the 2004 season. Weis was a dream come true–a genuine Notre Dame graduate (and they hadn’t had a ND graduate to be at the helm of the program in more than 40 years; indeed, the great Ara Parseghian was a Presbyterian from Miami U. and Lou Holtz, though Catholic, graduated from Kent State), who was also an established star coach in the “Sunday” league. After Willingham, whose opening season at ND in 2002 began with an 8-0 record before collapsing famously and was followed by two mediocre years, was fired, the thought was that Weis would return the program to the dizzying heights of Parseghian and Holtz. Indeed, some thought that the mythology of the 1920s might again return to ND, a mythology captured by the
