UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

happening before your eyes. Whether or not he stumbled a couple times last year is really not a concern for me. If we're being honest, he never really had a chance with the quarterbacks he was left with. The biggest mistake was not going to the portal for a QB last year. Not sure Freeman was able to make the call on that. Half the team and much of the staff was really Tommy's last year. Now the full coaching staff and the program are his. He had them ready for the big games (even though they came out on the losing end of both) which I see as a vital characteristic.

Freeman's recruiting power and his moral substance make him a guy that could legitimately stay at ND for two or three decades, always be good, always be in the playoffs and maybe win a couple of national championships in that time. He would go down in history as one of the greatest coaches of all time and would be immensely respected by everybody. That's the best case scenario for Notre Dame.

Are you still in denial about Marshall and Stanford? You are drunk on KoolAid as always. Looking for major improvements over his current 9-5 record and #22 ranking. Those are the numbers that matter.

(no message)

(no message)

Also depends...does that 10-2 with NY6 win come with Hartman healthy all year and playing great, or with a backup QB because Hartman got knocked out for the season.

With Hartman, par for this team vs this schedule should be 11-1...without Hartman maybe more like 9-3 for par.

How did we look in those 2 losses, and more importantly in the games vs our 4 best opponents. How was the health of key players during the season.

be surprised by it.

Sad.

Not a Notre Dame man.

Coach Freeman is great at both AND has an extremely high energy level.

The key will be his assistants.

(no message)

Davie basically brought in the equivalent of enough 4-star talent to keep us in the top 25, even if he pissed away many excellent offensive talents (David Givens, Javin Hunter, Tony Fisher, the list goes on and on).

Willingham had one good year (2003), where he was able to ride the high of being named Coach of the Year for that freakishly lucky 2002 season, and was able to passively put together a good class. His same approach of "recruit by osmosis" in 2004 and 2005 generated the two worst classes of all time.

Weis brought in more 4 and 5 star talent than we had ever seen, but even these recruits weren't ready in time to offset the terrible 2004 and 2005 classes. His biggest flaw wasn't recruiting; it was trusting the wrong person to run the defense that caused every loss in 2009, thanks to that idiot Jon Tenuta. In retrospect, he should have kept Rick Minter until a truly excellent DC were available and willing to come. That alone would have flipped 2-3 losses in 2008, and at least 4 of those losses in 2009 (conceivably even all of them).

(no message)

Slocum was able to produce top 10 teams with almost exclusively Texas talent, and knew the best hotspots for recruiting, especially the lesser known areas. I think that in 1992, 81 of the 85 scholarship players were from Texas.

His offenses couldn't score much more than 20ppg either and his defensive talent outweighed the offensive side.

And almost all of his 5* guys were on offense.

If he could have it available to fill holes in both starters and depth left by Willingham. as well as his own recruiting misses, I believe he may have been around a lot longer. Maybe even won a championship.

With the portal it would have been a lock for him to makeup for that terrible '05 class even with that great '06 class the talent was heavy offensively.

(no message)

A return to the greatest myth of college football, Weis the great offensive mind.

Maybe you just watched the Weis years prior to developing your self proclaimed "football knowledge", because Weis offenses were highly overrated and most consistently, inconsistent.

Sure, if you just look at the final stat line and see ppg and ypg it looks nice. But those with offensive knowledge who watch the performances (or lack there of) from his offenses have a hard time not throwing up a little at the thought of him returning.

First let me acknowledge this, since it was the base for this leg of the thread, yes Weis was a pretty darn good recruiter (especially considering the lack of on field success to use as a selling point).

But this garbage about his great offenses is pure nonsense. The two things most common with his offenses were: 1) complete lack of any offensive production for entire (and sometimes multiple) quarters 2) large point and yardage outburst in third or fourth quarters, normally when way behind due to no offensive production and defense being hung out to dry with 3 and out type drives piled on top of each other, for the rest of the game.

The best example of this was the 2008 USC game in which the mighty Weis offense played 45 straight minutes of football without gaining a single first down. Technically the first 1st down came at the end of the 3rd Quarter, but the last play of the third quarter was run with seconds on the clock and we gained our first 1st down when clock for 3rd quarter already went to 00.00.

Johnnie Cochran couldn't convince me a great offensive mind could coach three whole quarters without picking up a single first down.

While this is certainly the worst case and the only time his offensive hibernations lasted 3 straight quarters, it is not the only example as there were numerous times it happened for a whole quarter or two straight and some when he had three dead quarters in a game, but broken up by one explosive quarter mixed in somewhere.

When you consider the high level talent he recruited and was working with, it only amplifies his failures on the offensive side of the ball. It's true, he had some weak defenses, but it's also true he had some solid ones that were made to look bad by an offense that routinely hung them out to dry.

If you understand complimentary football AT ALL, there is no way you go back and watch Weis offenses (fuck the stat line and the highlights, watch it all)...there's no way you come away thinking yeah that's championship caliber offense right there.

I get it, there are some nice exciting big play highlights, if you only watch those it looks great...heck I was sitting in the endzone where Shark scored in final minute to save the UCLA game in '06. That play was exciting, that play was dynamic, but the offense on a whole that day would be best described as a hibernating bear sleep walking and trying to feel its way back to the cave without opening its eyes.

That is what too many of Weis' offensive performances looked like over his tenure. No F'ing Thanks...let that myth die.

Recruiting class was 40th previously to Top 5 his first year! He also had 3 Top 5 classes and the '08 class was a couple prospects from being #1 (but 'Bama signed 32) with 23 recruits. Clausen, Te'o, Floyd, Aldridge, Young, Gray, Kamara, Ragone, Crist, Rudolph and Cierre Wood were ALL 5* guys going into their Senior seasons and two of those guys were ranked #1. I'd love to have that kind of recruiting success right now, but injuries really did in his classes. High scoring offenses but bad defenses were a problem during that tenure.

No, I don’t accept that. If you feel that’s acceptable, then ND needs to clean house.