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Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Observer

Spygate, Cassel's success prove Weis can't coach

Perhaps this is just the bitter Steelers fan inside of me speaking after having two AFC Championships stolen, but Charlie Weis built his credentials on a lie now known publicly as "spygate" and Notre Dame deserves their money back. Spygate involved Patriots' video coordinator Matt Walsh filming the opposing team's defensive coordinator as well as pre-game warm-ups with the goal of knowing which play the defense was going to run on each down. Subsequently, Weis and the Patriots' offense would call the play they felt would be most effective against that defense. Clearly, this made calling the right plays and winning superbowls a whole lot easier.Sure, there is the school of thought that the Patriots' signal stealing was crafty and just part of the game, but when Notre Dame, a school with no knowledge of this alleged scandal, hires you solely because of your past success at picking plays, this becomes tantamount to fraud - fraud that the school wouldn't tolerate when they hired George O'Leary and fraud the school, when considering its Catholic roots and strict honor code, shouldn't tolerate now. After watching the Irish play their final regular season football game (if you even want to call it that), it became apparent that Weis, without knowing what the defense is running, is far from an offensive genius. In fact, when considering the Patriots' continued success without him and Notre Dame's ineptitude with him at the helm, you'd have to say he's the exact opposite - an obese, foul-mouthed, uninspiring leader who appears more desperate than Bob Saget's character in the movie Half Baked.Aside from his supposed genius on offense, Weis was brought in to develop young talent, since he was responsible for making Tom Brady what he is today. Or was he? This season, Bellicheck has molded Matt Cassel, a perennial backup who hasn't seen the field since high school, into a 400-yard-per-game fantasy football stud. Meanwhile, Clausen's decision making seemed to only get worse and worse as the season progressed. This is obviously the result of Charlie never having played football and therefore being unable to teach the fundamentals and intricacies of the game.To his credit, he never lied about his athletic accomplishments as O'Leary did. So, maybe the University is to blame for wrongfully attributing the Patriots and Tom Brady's success to Weis, and maybe calling his superbowls fraud is a bit of a stretch, and maybe Swarbrick should be fired for reliving our mistake, but since Charlie Weis is staying I'd like to offer him one piece of advice: Try not to fall too hard off of Bill Bellicheck's coattails, or you may just re-injure that knee, and destroy what little remains of your coaching career in the process.

Ryan ShestakjuniorDillon HallDec. 4