Last Chance to Cast Your Ballot for the 2008 All-Hairmerican Team

Well, it's the chilly aftermath of the season, so you know what that means: time to hand out the most prestigious honor in all of college athletics. I'm speaking, of course, of the 4th Annual House Rock Built All-Hairmerican team. I'm currently compiling votes for the final team, but would like to throw it out to the audience real quickly to nominate any over-achieving Hairmerican candidate that might have slipped through the cracks. Drop a note in the comments with your worthy nominee.

Sometime next week, I'll unveil the Offensive and Defensive All-Hairmericans... the 22 most glorious mops in college football. Also, I will hand out the coveted Hairsman Trophy to the individual player who has achieved the highest excellence in outrageous hair for the year. Keep your eye peeled, because we've got a strong class this year. My independent accounting firm prohibits me from releasing any of the sealed results until announcement time, but here's a look at the spreadsheet that I've been working on all season:

If you're interested, you can catch up on the last 3 Hairmerican classes here.

Charlie Versus The Volcano

Gird yourselves, men. Today everything we love is at war with everything we are more or less indifferent or ambivalent about.

Spoiler Alert: This game will end with you waking up in September in a cold sweat. What a crazy dream.

Interactive Fun!

If you're like me, you're watching lots of football, which naturally means lots of commercials. If you happen to have that Subway song stuck in your head, feel free to use this handy soundboard to act out your own version of the song. Hooray!

In which the metaphor is extended

I can be accused of having many opinions on Notre Dame football. All of them equally passionate, fleeting, and vociferous. I slide in and out of them so quickly and completely, that there are times when even I can't explain my point of view because there are traces of past perspectives across the board, leaving me, in a sense, everywhere at once. Anyway, before I continue the genocide of commas set off by my blogging co-defendant, let me get to my argument of the breadth and depth of the fucked-up-ed-ness of the situation.

There is constant analysis and navelgazing of virtually every Notre Dame decision of the past 10 (30?) years, all of them centering around choice. Who had the power to choose? When did they have it? How did they come to their decision? I would like to step back from this exercise in futility, no one can ever really know what was on (or not on) the minds of the so-called "Powers That Be" so much as no one can ever really explain to me how decisions are really made at Notre Dame. The real question is what is the choice Jack Swarbrick had to make for Notre Dame?

At the end of it all, Jack Swarbrick had to choose between Giant Douche or a Turd Sandwich.



Regardless of your opinion of the breadth and depth of the available coaching pool, and such analysis has firmly become its own internet niche, the point is that there are precious few coaches that can improve the program beyond what Charlie Weis has built. What the program so sorely needed was a reconstruction from the ground up, and in these efforts no one can fault Charlie. 8 years of heartless coaching and sheer arrogance had rendered the program a smoldering pile of ashes in the freezing South Bend winter. The talent myth has been broken. The facilities myth is buried under 20 million dollars of weight rooms and trophy cases. Notre Dame is a destination for recruits as long as there is confidence in the program. Its really hard for Charlie to keep flashing those Super Bowl rings when my even my grandmother has to hear speculation about this Brian Kelly person on WGN.

So, on most tangible metrics, Charlie Weis is our guy. Of course, on-field performance and its related perks are still in neglect, but how different is that from anything else here in year 12 of the post Holtz era? I guess this is the real point driving the issue. Notre Dame has finally finally finally FINALLY gotten most of the pieces in place, but we've locked ourself in to a situation that can only be fully described as sub-optimal. Weis has not been able to show that he can improve upon raw offensive talent, and his fatal flaw of over tweaking to the point of Decided Schematic Failure is obvious. Even in his staff improvements, he has not proven that he can be an anything more than a glorified recruiter/QB coach.

But, with all of the evidence at hand, and rather large stakes, what decision was there to make? Most decisions would have cost Notre Dame a great degree of capital. In terms of money, there was the buyout. In terms of public image, the school was unprepared to do anything more than unleash the Keystone Cops on the coaching carousel. In terms of recruiting, a lot was at stake to maintain the momentum Weis has built the last 4 years. All of these costs, regardless of respective size and importance, factored in to the effective price of the decision, and despite our combined hopes and dreams for the program, none of them include an athletic director that fails to see the proper risk/reward. Chasing good money with bad money got Notre Dame into this mess so many years ago, and believing that doing the same thing over and over will produce a different result is the very definition of insanity.

Waterloo

Sorry to keep popping my head up only for serious things, but these I suppose are serious, joyless times under the Golden Dome, and now is a good time to take a deep breath and take stock. Humor will return next year, I promise.

If you haven't heard already, Charlie Weis will more likely than not be the coach in 2009, which I'm sure this readership regards with a wide spectrum of emotions ranging from "the-soup-is-too-cold-and-has-what-appears-to-be-a-portion-of-an-insect-in-it-but-the-waitress-is-really-rude-and-it's-probably-not-really-worth-making-a-scene-over-so-what-the-hell-i'll-just-be-a-grown-up-about-everything-and-try-my-best-to-enjoy-my-lukewarm-meal-because-seriously-with-the-recession-and-the-wars-and-everything-it's-not-terribly-bad-cosmically-speaking" (which, not that you asked, is the official emotional position of this blog. Well, I'm not sure about irishoutsider, he can speak for himself if he ever finds the time to post) to the more NDNation-esque reaction of basic smashing-all-electrical-appliances-in-the-house and whatnot. Regardless, it's time to get pragmatic about it and sort of lay a framework, emotion-wise, for how to handle the 2009 campaign and generally minimize drunken Domer-on-drunken Domer violence should the subject of Notre Dame football come up in bar conversation over the next twelve months or so.

PART ONE: IN WHICH WE BRIEFLY POST-MORTEM THIS YEAR, BUT ONLY A LITTLE

We'll first go to the tape to see where we stand at the conclusion (potential bowl game notwithstanding, and, you know, not meaningfully regarded anyway) of this letdown of a season. Taking a look back at my statistically wonky data sheet I cooked up last week (with updated numbers and averages), we can safely say that the running game has not changed from 2007. Last week, I saw a 10 or so yard difference from last year, but I've since fished out that all that change in rushing yardage is attributable to the change in sack yardage from last year, which I forgot counts toward rushing totals in the college game. Restoring itself from epic futility last year, this year's team was able to hew off about 19.5 yards of sack yardage (ugh, redundancy [sic], but I don't know how to recast that sentence. Sorry, grammar Nazis), which more than accounts for the supposed improvement from last year. The pass protection improvement aside, this means that in terms of actually lining up and running the ball, the 2008 team was the same as (actually, worse than, although statistically insignificantly so [triple adverb score! {sorry, I'm at a heightened sense of grammatical awareness after spending this football season distracting myself by reading through the complete works of David Foster Wallace, which I guess would also explain the excessive parenthetical action you're getting here too, now that I think about it (footnotes being not really an option in the whole format of blog posting, after all)}]) the 2007 team, sort of undermining the whole experience excuse from last year (hopefully you still remember what we were talking about before that whole parenthesis thing, which, again, sorry).

On the other hand, the passing numbers are undeniably better, even better than I first expected when I glibly tried to write it off as the result of a single player. Properly assigning sack yardage to the passing statistics, you can see a net improvement of 117.57 yards per game, which is a whole hell of a lot, actually. Just looking at the pretty pretty colors on my chart, it can be stated with some statistical authority that the team has, in fact, improved in overall offense from last year, which shouldn't be interpreted as great praise for the team considering what they started with, but should be passively observed.

PART TWO, IN WHICH WE LOOK AT NEXT YEAR

Maybe if I say it really fast, I won't get my skin flayed off by cynical Irish fans, so... TheOverallTalentOnTheRosterIn2009IsEnoughToGetOneExcitedDespiteTheLastTwoYears. Yes, yes, they're all underperforming bums who haven't been taught the fundamentals of football &c., but 2009 will be the, roster-wise, the payoff year for having Charlie Weis do his Recruitasaurus Rex job that (if you read between the lines of the athletic director's sort of faintly mumbling vote of confidence) is, ostensibly, the main thing that is keeping him (Charlie, that is) employed for another year. The 2009 Irish offense will line up end to end with 4- and 5-star upperclassmen, even at many backup positions. As a result of his (supposed) retention, Charlie Weis will get at least one year to get behind the wheel of the offensive big rig that he (earnest praise for coach coming up here, so shield your eyes if you don't want to see it) worked his ever-loving ass off on the recruiting trail to build. Now, history (and statistics, q.v. supra) has (or have? Do parenthetical expressions change the plurality of a sentence's subject?) shown that developing high school talent into college football players is not even remotely within the skill set of this coaching staff, but I guess next year will be the big chance to prove or disprove that once and for all.

Defensively, the outlook is bright too, especially since the unit wasn't half bad to begin with this year. And, of course, the schedule, for better or for worse, will once again continue its path of being dumbed down. It's a little to early to go line-by-line and start picking games damn near a year in advance, but on paper I think it's fair to say that the Irish will have superior talent and experience (that latter being crucial to the equation) to 11 of the teams on the schedule.

In light of this, I think that expectations for 2009 should be very high (hopes, on the other hand, are free to and probably encouraged to plunge into the abyss). The standard for success for 2009 should be set very high, and withering punishment should be wrought down on those responsible if they are not attained.



PART THREE, IN WHICH WE TALK ABOUT THIS "COACHES HOT SEAT" AND REPLACEMENT STRATEGY, IF NEED BE

You can allow yourselves to be relieved about the retention of Charlie Weis (even if you're among the television-smashing crowd, q.v. supra) because it means that this winter will not involve the bungling, super-publicized campaign of futility that would be a brand new athletic director still unpacking his clickly-clacky kinetic energy balls on string thing at his desk (I'll save you a thousand words and link a picture. What the hell are those things called?) ambling around the country looking for the sixth Irish coach of the decade without any sort of plan or design at all. Ceding 2009 to the "Hot Seat" gives the administration a chance to conduct its due diligence in the privacy of its own office. Regardless of whether it turns out to be necessary or not, the athletic department will need to spend the next year compiling names, checking (and re-checking, by God!) resumés, and sending out innocuous, non-illegal feelers and whatnot so that a big, thick, detailed action plan (and I mean, literally, a giant book with one of those fancy leather covers) will be in hand if firing becomes necessary at the end of the year (note, this also means getting a very precise handle on this buyout clause).

We'll talk more about the objective standards of the Hot Seat as the season gets closer and we have a good handle on what the competition will be like, but as of today I think 10 regular season wins is a pretty safe number to guess, determined by "How many wins could [insert Tier 2 coaching candidate that we passed on this year, e.g. Brian Kelly] scrap together with this talent?" After that, it's just sit back and enjoy the ride. If Charlie Weis can do it, then saints be praised, we might actually be on the right track. If not, then at least his successor will be stepping into a much, much better job than the one he inherited. While I'm sure this legacy would be viewed as a crushing failure for a hyper-competitive guy like Weis who, let's face it, had wanted ("had wanted" sounds clumsy here, but I want to stress the use of the conditional tense. Using the past tense "wanted" would make it sound like his fate was already sealed, which it is this blog's editorial opinion that it is not) with all his being to succeed at this job, I think at the end of the day Irish fans, who have been through every form of soul-suckerpunching that exists over the last decade, will (erm, I mean, would), in time, learn to count it as a blessing.

Progress!

Hey party animals, just thought I'd come out of exile briefly to throw some knowledge down on you. I'm not going to cry my little heart out or spray piss and vinegar about the severely disappointing 2008 Irish squad, because we're all, I'm sure, feeling the same way about... all that noise. Your faithful reporter just wanted to share with you some insights he received when ruminating over the offensive statistics over the past two years trying to flesh out some kind of workable hypothesis as to what the hell is going on with this team.

So here's what I did. I filled out this spreadsheet, a sort of dizzying jumble of numbers for those of you who aren't like in tune with the bizarre machinations of my mind. Essentially, I tried to put our offensive statistics from each game over the last two years into a meaningful context by comparing our rushing and passing totals with our opponents' defensive averages over the course of the year, essentially coming up with a metric on how our performance against any given defense rated stacked up against the other 11 teams they played over the course of the year. The verdicts?

1.) There was absolutely zero improvement in our rushing game. In 2007, the Irish averaged 52.81 fewer rushing yards against their opponents than the rest of their opponents. One full year of maturity, strength training, and coaching later, the 2008 Irish are averaging 41.06 fewer yards against their opponents, an "improvement" of just over 10 yards a game. It's an unqualified failure for this coaching staff to start with one of the worst offenses in college football and, working tirelessly a year, increase their production by 30 feet every 60 minutes.

The statistics look grimmer if you filter out the first three games of 2007, when the Demetrius Jones spread option experiment was still being vaguely employed. Using the rushing averages from only the last 9 games of 2007, the 2008 team has actually regressed to the tune of 10 yards per game. You read that right, we actually found a way to get worse than 2007 in this area.

2.) There has been an undeniable improvement in the passing game. Hey, some good-ish news! With an extra year of maturity and system work and coaching and whatnot, Jimmy Clausen has improved his per game output from negative 52.23 to positive 35.94, an (very significant) improvement of 88.17 yards per game. These stats, obviously, don't take into account his explosive increase in interceptions, but I think the point is clear enough that the 2008 Irish squad has actually improved its ability to legitimately move the ball down the field via the pass.

3.) Michael Floyd's added presence almost singlehandedly defines this increase in production. Remember that 88.17 yards of improvement in the passing game I mentioned? A certain monstrous freshman (the only new skill position starter on the roster) who has spent the season leaping over defenders and catching jump balls averages 78 yards per game this season. Aside from those ten extra passing yards and the ten rushing yards I mentioned in part 1, Michael Floyd is responsible for the entire improvement in this offense from 2007. So what happened when he got injured at the very beginning of the Navy game? The offense went in the toilet. After six straight games of exceeding the average yardage surrendered by the opposing defense, the Irish underachieved the next two games by an average of 50 yards.

I guess the bottom line is that the offensive statistics indicate that the 2008 Irish are the 2007 Irish with one exceptional player thrown into the mix. Pretend the rushing game is the "control group", which is to say it had no talent added to it from last year and only a year of coaching and maturing to improve. The result? No statistically significant change. The passing game is the test group, which has a dynamic player added to it plus, just like the other group, a year's worth of seasoning and coaching, resulting in an improvement equal to the dynamic player's output.

Perhaps it's a bit self-serving with the data to say that this (admittedly completely ad-hoc) study shows that the "coaching and seasoning" factor for improvement is zero, but I think it's pretty hard to dispute looking over the numbers. I'm prepared to say, drawing from this data, that the offensive coaching staff has failed to do anything at all to improve the talent already on the team over the last year, and the only reason there has been a statistical improvement from last year's (historically) bad offense is the injection of a talented freshman.

N.B.: My subjective opinion is that the defense actually did improve this year, although I don't have the heart right now to go over the numbers like I did here. Right now, I just kind of want to cry and drink gin for a little while. Maybe I'll do this same thing for the defense after I've stuffed my face with a few chocolate cheesecakes.

FailTrees.com

Jim Harbaugh Writes Scathing Complaint Letter to Pac 10 Referees

Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh rocked the college football world this afternoon by firing off a tersely-worded, spelling-error laced letter to Dave Cutaia, the chief of officials in the Pac 10 conference.

The play in question happened after a Stanford punt where a Cardinal defender knocked down the ball with his shoulder pad and then another downed the ball before inexplicably running with the ball into the end zone after the whistle. Harbaugh stormed out onto the field and screamed at the officials for several minutes, demanding that the Cardinal be awarded a touchdown irrespective of the interference penalty, the fact that no Irish player touched the ball, the fact that there was no fumble, and in the rule that a kicking team can not advance a muffed punt. After flinging his hat into the stands, Harbaugh threw himself bodily onto the field and went completely limp, forcing one of the line judges to drag him by his arm onto the sidelines during an NBC commercial break.

In his post game statement, Harbaugh displayed an outstanding lack of self-awareness by calling out the football knowledge of the referees while, at the same time, demonstrating his own total ignorance of the rules regarding advancing muffed punts.

"We got a couple of bad calls. It's hard to imagine people don't know football any better than that. I still can't get over it. It was a really bad call. It should have been our ball and a touchdown for us."

While most people might consider an embarrassing childish display and a hilariously ironic post-game quote a successful day's work, Harbaugh showed that can-do spirit that has made him such an endearing figure in Palo Alto by not letting it end there, instead taking it one step further by sending out this letter to the Pac 10 conference this morning.

BREAKING NEWS: Joe Tiller Falls Asleep at Table Trying to Read Morning Paper Again

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN -- Sources have confirmed that at approximately 7:28 AM this morning, retiring Purdue football coach Joe Tiller collapsed at his breakfast table in West Lafayette, into what doctors are calling a "very brisk slumber". Tiller, 65, was reported to be in "good health and high spirits" only moments before the dreadful incident by his wife, Arnette, who observed him gingerly sipping a half a cup of decaffeinated coffee and leafing through the front section of the Lafayette Journal and Courier.

"He seemed perfectly fine to me," a frazzled Arnette remarked to reporters on the scene. "I went into the living room to answer the phone, and five minutes later, I came back and found him... like this."

Paramedics on the scene conducted a thorough examination on Tiller. His face was still pressed firmly against page three of the newspaper and his hand was still gripping the half-full mug of decaffeinated coffee. After observing the warm, expanding puddle of drool pooling over the advertisements in the right column of the Journal and Courier and his gentle, steady stream of snoring punctuated by occasional snorts and loud, wet lip-smacks, they diagnosed him as "asleep" and determined his condition to be "stable".

When asked if this scare would jeopardize the rest of the season, the doctor on scene was optimistic. "You'd be surprised how often I see this condition, particularly in people Joe [Tiller]'s age. About ninety percent of the time, the whole thing blows over within thirty minutes. After emerging from the condition, the recovery is very rapid, and he should be back to full speed within hours. The prognosis is very positive."

This hasn't been the first such health scare for Tiller. In fact, just yesterday, he collapsed in a strikingly similar incident, again at his breakfast table, and again fewer than five pages into that morning's Journal and Courier. Tiller was roused from his condition after only fifteen minutes, and reported that he was having a "lovely dream about reading the newspaper and then taking a nap."

Charlie Weis Needs New Transportation. The House Rock Built to the Rescue!

There were a lot of embarrassing things that happened on Saturday in East Lansing, but easily the most preventable one was Charlie Weis' humorous inability to, you know, like move more than five feet in any direction. Several times, the broadcast feed cut over to Weis after a punt to show him hobbling torturously inch by inch toward the new line of scrimmage on a busted knee. About three plays later, he would make it over to where the action was, just in time to see another Irish punt and embark on another lengthy journey. It was sort of like watching a salmon struggling to the point of near-death in their Sisyphean swim against a brutally harsh current... heartbreaking, in its pure hopeless fatalism, but nonetheless part of nature's way.

While The House Rock Built can't really offer any advice to helping the on-field problems with the Irish, our crack scientists have come up with a wide range of solutions for Weis' motility problem that are cost-effective, easy to implement, and immediately effective. When was the last time you saw a Notre Dame coach do anything that would be described that way?

Solution One: Segway

By far our most intuitive and straightforward solution. For a few grand, you can get all the functionality of a personal motility device without any of the embarrassment that might come from tooling around the sidelines in a Rascal scooter. Plus, I know for a fact that Indiana Excise police has dozens of these things, since their storm troopers patrol pre-game tailgating to squash out any underage recreation with their shoot-first ask-questions-later brand of vigilante justice. I'm sure they can spare one, particularly since the Irish football team are their most valuable customers.

Admittedly, there might be some problems with this. For example, the high-powered gyroscope processor in the Segway might violate some archaic anti-laptop rules. Similarly, Weis' largesse might exceed the weight rating for a Segway, to which I offer this simple solution: A chariot pulled by two eunuchs on Segways.


Ha Ha! Problem Solving!

Solution Two: Hannibal Lecter-Style Gurney Thing

If practicality is your game, then the Segway makes sense, but something tells me that the Irish need a little extra boost in motivation after last week's flat performance. To whit, I recommend the Hannibal Lecter Gurney Thing. One sight of Weis being wheeled around in this thing by two orderlies in all white and opposing teams will run and hide. It's motivational gold.


Adding some frothing at the mouth would help, too

Solution Three: Exotic Contraptions

If the University is really serious about getting Weis up and down the field in a hurry, though, it will invest a little bit of money in an elaborate machine of my design. So far, I have two prototypes worked out. First is an elaborate horizontal dumb-waiter, which can be wheeled manually or (my personal recommendation), cranked by a steam-powered turbine and ultra-high speeds. Not only will this solve the problem of getting Weis up and down the field, but it will also help to prevent any future collisions, as he'll be able to get downfield before the punted ball even arrives there. Now that's progress!



Or, my personal favorite, the gigantic catapult! Accurately calibrated, this 15-foot trebuchet will use centripetal force to launch its payload to the exact spot of the line of scrimmage, where there will presumably be a large pile of mattresses or a net to brace Charlie's fall. Or, hell, if we lose a few more games like this, forget the mattresses. Two problems solved at once.

It's Saturday!!!!

Hey... Go Irish.

And Now, Your Inevitable Yakety Sax Video

Take your medicine, Wolverines. Take your medicine:

It's crunchy and delicious.