This is not a rating of the power of different teams issued in the preseason. Rather, this is a Power Rating of Preseasons. Notre Dame preseasons, in fact. The ground rules:
- “Preseason” does not mean “Offseason.” It refers, specifically, to the August anticipatory period between practice beginning and the kick-off of the season.
- There are three factors that determine how much Power a preseason had:
- Anticipation – how hotly interesting was the upcoming year
- Entertainment – did anything noteworthy transpire in the preseason period
- Climax – how satisfying (or not) was the opening of the season
We’re going to proceed in chronological order, beginning with my freshman year of 2003.
2003 – RETURN TO RETURN TO GLORY
Everyone was excited to recapture the magic of Coach Willingham’s first season (before the pastings by USC and NC State to end the year). A heralded freshman class was incoming, we had the reigning Coach of the Year, Julius Jones was back, and The Shirt looked exactly as it had in 2002. We were in but not all-in. Whether they admitted it or not, everyone smelled the whiff of mess as the wheels fell off at the end of 2002. We were ranked #20 in the preseason and saw a stunning comeback erasea gross, gross 1st half of football against Washington St. in the opener. When the Irish got shellacked in Ann Arbor the next week, it had the feeling more of a sobering re-assertion of reality than a true shock. Belief ebbed and flowed from there.
ANTICIPATION: B+ ENTERTAINMENT: C CLIMAX: C
2004 – “I IMMEDIATELY REGRET THIS DECISION”
This season was somehow more readily anticipated than ’03. The hope was that a young squad had taken its lumps in ’03 and ND really put a nice November together before getting blown out by a bad Syracuse team to close out the year. Infamously, this was the year ND has reshuffled its schedule to get a “tune-up” trip to BYU set before Michigan came to town for the home opener. Also infamously, Willingham & Co. decided to mostly practice against Michigan schemes anyway, leading to one of the ugliest opening losses this side of 2007:
I remember this game well: 11 punts, terrible line play, Rhema McKnight fielding a punt on his own 1, Preston Jackson with the pick-6 that kept us in the game Lovie Smith style. If my dorm was any indication ND fans were crushed by this one – kids were printing out transfer applications to other schools.
Weirdly, not only the extended prep for Michigan pay off the next week but when it did all was forgiven. Everyone was on the bandwagon for the rest of September – up until we got pantsed by Taylor Stubbefield and Purdue. Also, the whole experience yielded this tweet thread from last month. all in all a pretty great Preseason experience!
ANTICIPATION: A- ENTERTAINMENT: B+ CLIMAX: B
2005 – “WE NEED TO SAVE DENT! I NEED TO SAVE DENT”
ND really had put it all on the line in the 2004 offseason: firing Ty, whiffing on Meyer, enduring the worst PR offseason in memory. As Weis’ brashness restored some confidence, everyone really, really, really wanted it to all have been worthwhile. The tea leaves were there (or, as Peggy Noonan would say, “The vibrations were right”) – recruiting was picking up steam, Weis was winning press conference after press conference, etc. And then Darius Walker took that screen pass 51-yards and we were off.
ANTICIPATION: A+ ENTERTAINMENT: B+ CLIMAX: A
2006 – INFLECTION POINTS
The preseason that should have been really fun, but somehow wasn’t. Optimism was high. ND had a truly stacked roster in NCAA 2006. Weis was either making weird noises in press conferences (“Whoosh”) or was going on extended monologues about how he’d taught Brady Quinn how to modulate his voice just so when talking to guys in the huddle (anyone who can track down the transcript of this gets a gold star). The pressure of the preseason No. 2 ranking and the Quinn Heisman campaign were heavy, and the 14-10 opening night slog in Atlanta didn’t help matters.
ANTICIPATION: A ENTERTAINMENT: C- CLIMAX: C+
2007 – RUDY 2: CURSE OF THE GOLD HELMET
The old Blue-Gray Sky blog is proving invaluable for this exercise. Pete over there did a thought exercise//roundtable-of-self laying out positive and negative scenarios. Here was the over-the-top negative take:
Here’s how I see it: the Georgia Tech game is a loss. It should be a win, but the fact that there is zero warmup time for the team means they lose a close one. Penn State: second game, on the road in a stadium that’s been prepping for us all year, and a relatively experienced team? Don’t like our odds there. Michigan: their stadium, offense that torched us last year still intact, gimme another L. Michigan State? We should beat them, but stranger things have happened against them. Purdue? Same. UCLA? Once again, on the road, experienced team against our young’uns. Are you noticing a pattern here? BC: Perfectly located on the schedule (for them), sandwiched between a West Coast jaunt against a good team and the biggest game of the year. Oh, and they’re experienced, with one of the better quarterbacks out there this year. Perfect upset fodder. USC? Best we’re hoping for is competitive. The rest are jokes. The way I see it, a .500 record would exceed expectations.
It was an interesting time. I think fans were on the one hand were intellectually understanding the depth-chart air bubble that would becoming to the fore post-Willingham, but on the other hand taking for granted that the rapid development of stars like Quinn, Samardizjia, et al. would be all the more fun to see with a new cast of characters. It did not go well.
ANTICIPATION: A- ENTERTAINMENT: B- CLIMAX: F+
2008 – “IT’S STILL GOOD! IT’S STILL GOOD!”
This offseason was probably somewhere in the “Bargaining” stage of grief for the Weis Regime That Was Hoped For. Naturally, we couldn’t have been as bad as 2007 showed us to be. Deep down, though, we all realized that “Our version of Pete Carroll” wouldn’t ever have put such a product on the field. It took all of one putrid half against a bad San Diego St. squad to know that “”Jimmy Clausen Takes a Lebron-type Year 2 Leap” was not something that was on offer. This was a bad preseason. Something to be said, as well, for this preseason getting swalowed by the noise of world events: Beijing Oympics, Sarah Palin, beginnings of the economic crash, etc.
ANTICIPATION: C ENTERTAINMENT: C- CLIMAX: D+
2009 – ONE BILLBOARD OUTSIDE NOTRE DAME, IN
Weirdly, given the disappointing close to 2008, the 2009 preseason was fantastic! Despite an overall bad year, the 2008 team had shown itself to have some honest-to-goodness transcendent start power in Golden Tate and Mike Floyd. The ND universe had gotten a big perceptual shot in the arm when Manti Te’o chose the Irish as well. Touchdon Jim Clausen had gone supernova in the 2008 Hawai’i Bowl. All our losses down the stretch in 2008 had been by one score – the hallmark of a young team figuring it out! Signs of momentum — or at least the clear promise of a decisive verdict on Weis — made this season’s start worthy of a good deal of anticipation
Hilariously, the contretremps of this training camp was provided by a bunch of disgruntled former players who did this:
It gets weirder. Apparently ND pressured the billboard company to have this message taken down after three days. Eric Hansen:
In its space Thursday evening was a message promoting the U.S. Marine Corps.
“They took away my freedom of speech,” said Tom Reynolds, a former Notre Dame reserve linebacker who said he paid Burkhart to run the message for 12 weeks. “And Notre Dame pressured them to do it.”
Notre Dame officials deny having anything to do with having the billboard removed. Burkhart personnel didn’t return phone calls asking for comment.
Reynolds is a retired college marketing professor who lettered for the Irish in 1967. He claims to represent roughly 50 former Irish football players, mostly from his era, who are like-minded in their opinion of Weis’ 29-21 record after four seasons.
Reynolds said he and other former players plan to wear green T-shirts emblazoned with the expunged billboard’s message at Saturday’s season-opener against Nevada.
Reynolds lives in Wyoming, but is a Notre Dame season ticket holder and plans to be at every game this season.
“I hope they don’t take that away from me,” he said.
Reynolds wouldn’t go as far to say he that he would consider legal action against Burkhart, but he vowed, “This isn’t the end of this.”
In a lot of ways, this whole story makes me pine for a more innoncent era. Today, the outlets of social media provide loosely organized groups like the “Linebacker Alumni” so much latitude to roast and dunk on public figures that something like this wonderful non-sequitir of a gesture (I recall at the time many people thought this had been crowdfunded not by men who had played linebacker for ND, but rather by patrons of the Linebacker Lounge) would never be chosen as a direct course of action.
Anyway, the Irish eviscerated Colin Kaepernick’s Nevada Wolfpack in the opening game, and the bandwagon was off!
ANTICIPATION: A- ENTERTAINMENT: A CLIMAX: A
As someone who was there in 2005 and 2006, I assure you that the anticipation was *much* higher in August 2006 than 2005. In 2005 people weren’t fully in on Weis until this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WT0CZyG0fQY
Yea. I recall herbstreit puting the Irish as his preseason #1.
I don’t know – that was the summer going into my senior year and I recal a real stuffiness to things. That preseason magazine came out, the Weis 60 minutes thing, but through it all I think everyone had a nagging apprehension that it was too good to be true
I think there was that “we are potentially overrated” vibe for sure, but nobody thought we’d be any good going into 2005! Also there wasn’t a ton of excitement for Weis at the time – he was a backup hire and everyone knew it.
By contrast, the next year there were multi-hour lines to get his biography signed at the Bookstore in August (sadly, I know the hard way…)
I don’t think I realized at the time how bad Willingham was at recruiting. Do most of you think that Weis essentially had an *impossible* task given that there were two recruiting classes that were really bad?
He could last a couple years on the basis of the upperclassmen and rely on some key young stars he did recruit to keep it going. But with holes all over due to missing out on 2 classes, is there really anything else he could have done?
I suppose the idea would be that if Weis were better at developing the talent he recruited, they would have been much better. There did seem to be a lot of highly touted recruits that didn’t amount to much under him. But wow Weis 2007 and 2008 classes with 17(!) top 100 recruits combined during those two years. (Though perhaps recruiting rankings were not as accurate then?)
I think recruiting rankings have gotten better. There is so much more availability, and things like the 247 composite are able to take a massive aggregation, which will generally be more accurate than the opinions of a few experts.
That said, I think they were probably pretty accurate even back then. I credit 3 keys to Weis’s failure.
Overall, I love Weis and think he was almost certainly the best coach that we could have gotten at that time. I think he did everything he could, as you mentioned, and lost a lot more games because of that roster, than he would if he stepped in now. Most importantly, he set us up to be attractive enough to land BK. He probably could have had a long career on a recruiting staff or as an offensive analyst (or NFL OC), but just not a good HC.
When did 247 start? Because they show rankings back to around 2003 but are those composite rankings?
Exactly:
It also does make me appreciate Kelly a bit more thinking about it. That while Kelly has not been the recruiter of stars that Weis was, Kelly has been an overall better CEO for a program including development of players. It’s not easy to develop players the way Kelly has over the years.
247 sports launched in August of 2010. I think their composite score came around a year or so after that, but can’t find anything specific about when composite was launched. I think their older rankings are only the composite, where they dug up old info from Scout, Rivals, and ESPN.
That’s what I wondered. It makes sense they took the old data and ran it through their algorithm which just wouldn’t include their own rankings.
I covered this in an article earlier this summer (you commented on this one, so I know you’re aware of it, but for any newbies): https://18stripes.com/why-i-still-dont-hate-charlie-weis/
My opinion – and I think this has settled as the consensus opinion – is that Willingham’s awful recruiting made it a certainty that 2007 and ’08 were going to be underwhelming to just plain bad seasons almost no matter who was coaching, but there’s little argument against the fact that Weis’ inability to manage the team made it worse. The grab-bagging Demetrius Jones stuff against Georgia Tech to open the season, in retrospect, really should’ve made it obvious Weis’ tenure was doomed.
o right! It’s been a long summer (with looking for a house and actually moving). I had forgotten about that article – which is among my favorite because I’ve never understood the hatred for Weis and I’ve always tried to appreciate him for what he was and did. And your article showed how one should appreciate him even though he was ultimately a failure of sorts. And your article is a perfect compliment to this one since, at least for me, it brought back the questions of why Weis’s teams catered toward the end.