In the immediate aftermath of Notre Dame’s dramatic win over Purdue on Saturday, I tweeted, “And Purdue saves Charlie Weis’s job by calling a terrible timeout that probably cost them the game. Irish win!” Stewart Mandel expands on this thought:
If Notre Dame, now 3-1, winds up reaching the BCS promised land, affording Charlie Weis many more years of his $4 million salary, he should personally cut a check to his Purdue counterpart, who committed one of the all-time clock management blunders Saturday night.
With the Boilers leading 21-17, 37 seconds remaining and Notre Dame out of timeouts, Irish running back Robert Hughes was stopped at the Purdue two-yard line on second-and-goal. Weis was fully planning to have quarterback Jimmy Clausen spike the ball to stop the clock — but [Purdue coach Danny] Hope did it for them. He called time out, preserving third down for the Irish.
“That helped us out a little bit right there,” Weis said.
You think? Following an incompletion, Clausen hit tight end Kyle Rudolph on fourth-and-goal for the game-winning score. Season saved, crisis averted.
“I just wanted to have enough time to run a couple of plays [after Notre Dame scored],” said Hope, apparently not a huge believer in his defense. “If I looked at the situation again maybe it wasn’t a great idea.”
Indeed not. But the result was great for the Irish. And if it leads to even greater things — well, it wouldn’t be the first time in recent years that an opposing team’s poor coaching saved Notre Dame’s season and propelled Weis & co. to a BCS bowl.
Remember the monsoon game at Michigan State in 2006? If John L. Smith & co. don’t “ask Drew Stanton to run the option in Hurricane Katrina,” Notre Dame doesn’t win that game, doesn’t arrive at the Coliseum 10-1 (with an obviously, predictably inflated #6 ranking), and doesn’t finish 10-2 and earn a Sugar Bowl berth even after the ritual drubbing by USC.
Indeed, to put it even more starkly: if Slappy wasn’t such a bad coach, Charlie Weis wouldn’t have that all-important “took the Irish to two BCS bowls” line on his resumé as a counterweight to the immense crappiness of the 2007 and 2008 seasons, and therefore might conceivably not have a job right now.
Here’s hoping Purdue’s blunder proves as significant to ND’s fortunes as Michigan State’s did. GO IRISH! BEAT HUSKIES! (And then LOSE TO TROJANS! And then WIN ALL THE REST OF YOUR GAMES! But let’s just beat the Huskies, and then we’ll get to all that in due course…)
Wait, you WANT Weis to keep his job? Even though he’s a terrible coach and has won some of these games through sheer stupidity of his opponents and/or incredibly weak scheduling? Is this some sort of desire to see USC to have a permanent dominance in the series?
No, I want to see Notre Dame competitive against USC, and beating everybody else. But I’m not going to root against them making a BCS bowl this year in hopes of getting Weis canned. I presume that, if they continue to suck, he will get canned. If, on the other hand, they don’t continue to suck, that’ll mean he shouldn’t get canned, and won’t. So I root for them, and therefore him, to succeed; but if they don’t succeed, then I certainly want him gone. He’s long ago used up his excuses.
P.S. re: “incredibly weak scheduling” — that really varies from year to year. Two years ago, their schedule was brutal. This year, not so much. But it’s not as if Notre Dame is playing a bunch of I-AA or Sun Belt or MAC teams. Navy and Nevada, you’d always expect to be relatively easy — though still nowhere near as easy as your typical SEC cupcakes — whereas USC and Michigan, you’d always expect to be relatively tough. That leaves their other eight opponents: Purdue, Michigan State, Washington, Pittsburgh, Boston College, Wazzu, Stanford and UConn. Some years, that would be a pretty tough octet of games. Some years, less so. They’re in that middling range, making the toughness of the schedule difficult to predict a few weeks in advance, never mind a few years. This year, as things stand right now, Wazzu is awful, while the rest fall into the category of non-elite teams that are nevertheless quite capable of beating a decent-to-good opponent. Their Sagarin rankings (not in order) are 38, 41, 42, 44, 48, 59 and 67. (Unfortunately, 59 and 67 are Michigan State and Purdue, who almost just beat ND. This does not bode well for the rest of the season.)
P.S. I meant to add: next year, in addition to the Big Ten trio of Purdue-Michigan-Sparty, the rivals USC and BC, and the traditional opponent Navy, the Irish play Stanford, Pitt, Utah, Army, Tulsa, and an opponent to be named later. There was talk of the 12th opponent being TCU, but it looks like that isn’t going to happen. In any case, you can look at that schedule and say “OMG ARMY AND NAVY” if you like, but otherwise, depending on how various teams develop, it could be pretty tough. Or it could be relatively easy. When you’re playing a bunch of BCS teams (and quality mid-majors like Utah and Tulsa) in that middling #30-60 range, it’s just hard to predict in advance how tough the schedule will end up being. But, depending on who the 12th opponent ends up being, I’d put that schedule up against most BCS teams’ schedules. Even this year’s isn’t that bad, actually — the Irish’s full 2009 schedule ranks 39th in the country, ahead of such luminaries as Texas (#46), Virginia Tech (#51) and Florida (#55). You can call that “weak scheduling,” if you like, but I certainly don’t think you can justify labeling it “incredibly weak.” At most, it includes two games that might have been considered near-automatic wins when they were scheduled (Nevada and Navy), balanced against one near-automatic loss (USC). Wazzu ends up being a near-automatic win, too, but depending on when that series was scheduled, that fact was not necessarily obvious to the schedulers. The other eight games are all against teams that are, from the perspective of the people scheduling the games, certainly capable of beating the Irish in any given year.