Oct. 14, 2005

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By Eric Hansen

Special to CSTV.com

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -  It started long before there was a bandwagon. Months before Tyrone Willingham's first hint that his job was in jeopardy. More than a year before Notre Dame head football coach Charlie Weis moved into his new office in the plush Guglielmino Athletics Complex and decorated it with everything from Early American Rockne to a baseball cap emblazoned with the words "USC owns Notre Dame."

It started with a plan. With Weis, it always does. And almost always that plan changes and evolves.

The roots of this weekend's clash between top-ranked USC (5-0) and No. 9 Notre Dame (4-1) being a national obsession rather than a regional yawn started in the summer of 2004. Weis was in a funk over being passed over for NFL head coaching openings with the New York Giants and Buffalo Bills.

"By the time we were done playing in the Super Bowl, those jobs were all filled," Weis said. "But after whining about it, I reflected and thought, 'If they thought I was good enough, they would have waited for me.'"

So the plan changed. Weis, then the New England Patriots offensive coordinator, sat down with Pats head coach Bill Belichick and agent Bob Lamonte and turned his attention to the college ranks.

Ironically, they picked a program at random to use for a model. The school they chose was Notre Dame.

Weis laid out the assistant coaches he would hire, what his practice schedules would look like, how he'd deal with the media and players' parents and recruits.

He also studied the handful of back-to-school pro coaches who had moved seamlessly into the college ranks, guys like Iowa's Kirk Ferentz, Virginia's Al Groh and USC's Pete Carroll.

"I have often, and sometimes in jest, said that I'm a plagiarism type of guy," Weis said. "But usually guys who set the bar, we're all kind of the same breed. You just kind of tweak it with your own personality."

In Weis' case, that meant a brutally honest persona with plenty of non-G-rated adjectives mixed in.

That was layered over three basic principles that are largely responsible for Notre Dame blitzing through four road games in its first five contests with the ninth-most prolific offense in Div. I-A.

·          Never lose sight of the fact good coaches are good teachers.

·          Surround yourself with great people.

·          Think, talk and act out of the box.

"A lot of times, teams will show certain tendencies on film or certain statistical tendencies, but that often changes based on the score or weather conditions or whatever," Belichick said. "Some play-callers are late to adjust to those changes, but Charlie was very good at anticipating what was going to happen and staying ahead of the curve."

Weis wasn't worried about ND's seemingly brutal schedules and scoffed at the notion that academic bar might be set too high.

"Too many people too many times look at sports and see that dumb-jock stereotype from when we were all growing up," Weis said. "I think it's become much more of an intellectual game now in the approach and preparation. It's not just physical. It's not just 'Let's go pound them.' Your brain can be a definite weapon."

And so can attitude.

Weis dressed in a suit and carried around a clipboard and a zipped lip during his first official week on the job in February.

He didn't need to look at film or stats to see how far ND's offensive line play had fallen since a former ND coach Bob Davie (from whom Weis bought his house) nudged line guru Joe Moore into unemployment during his first weeks as head coach in December of 1996.

Save the 1998 season, when a Jim Colletto-coached line paved the way for 212.5 yards a game while yielding a miserly nine sacks, the biggest cracks in ND's tradition in the post-Lou Holtz Era have started and often finished with the offensive line.

Last year's line, for example, helped produced a school-record low 127.4 yards per game. Two seasons before, in what was billed as "The Return to Glory", the line gave up a school-record 38 sacks - with a mobile quarterback.

There were individual standouts, for sure. In fact, the four healthy starters on the 38-sack unit were all drafted into the NFL (Jeff Faine, Sean Mahan, Jordan Black and Brennan Curtin). Collectively, they lacked the cohesion, bite, and bottom line of the old Moore lines.

Which is one reason Weis considered Ole Miss' John Latina a pivotal hire. Here not only was a line coach with offensive coordinator's experience and a strong recruiting resume, he was a Joe Moore disciple all through his hard wiring.

"He is honestly one of the great motivators I've been around," Irish senior center Bob Morton said of Latina. "It's funny, I drove on campus at the beginning of the summer and somebody said, 'So are you excited about having one of Moore's boys back?' And I had no idea what that meant.

"But I sat there at that security gate for like 15 minutes while this guy described it to me. And I called my dad and talked to him about it. I got filled in pretty quick, so now I kind of understand what it all means."

They all did, the hard way.

There came a point in the winter workouts when Morton went to push himself up out of bed to turn off the 5:30 a.m. alarm and his arms wouldn't cooperate. Having converted defensive lineman Dan Santucci crawling closer in the rear-view mirror was the least of his problems.

Weis dropped the clipboard after one week of taking notes with the intention of breaking the team down to build them back up. The offensive line got particular attention, because Weis wanted to instill in them a defensive mentality.

"They thought they were working hard," he said. "But what they thought and I thought weren't the same, so I went through the process from there 'til about halfway through spring beating them down, like nothing was good. Finally, somewhere along the line, they turned on the switch. When they turn the switch on, so do you.

"You never take the pressure off them all together, but halfway through spring ball, they started to see the light that just maybe they've got a chance."

Then came a 42-21 whomping of Pittsburgh in the Sept. 3 season opener, followed by a 17-10 stunner over Michigan in Ann Arbor. Recruiting was just as impressive, if not more. When USC and ND take the field Saturday, 19 recruits will have committed to the Irish, with 11 more top prospects in attendance for the game.

But winning over the existing players was a bigger challenge for Weis than attracting new ones  even with a plan.

"Of all the things that have happened since I've been here, I've really appreciated the way they've rolled with the punches," Weis said of the Irish players, "because the difference in personalities between me and Tyrone was significant. We're just different guys. Forget about X's and O's. Forget about all those other things. Having to deal with a different personality, I think, is a significant change with the team.

"I think they've figured me out. I think that when you realize that I'm doing everything for a reason, liking it really isn't the issue. It's just trying to make it work."