Charlie Weis and the unforgivable sin of ineptitude (2007)
The unifying theme of coaching and politics: No one wants an arrogant loser.
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I.
I cannot tell you the precise moment when the whole thing went to hell for Charlie Weis, but the brushfire appeared to rage out of control in September of 2007. That’s when Notre Dame began yet another attempt at a resurgent season with a 33-3 loss to Georgia Tech and a 31-10 loss to Penn State. At that point, the rampant media pile-on began, and it continued over the course of the next couple of weeks, as Notre Dame lost 38-0 to Michigan and 31-14 to Michigan State and 38-0 to USC, as they folded in on themselves amid a 3-9 campaign that may still be one of the most surprisingly awful seasons in college football history.
That would have been bad enough as it was, merely for the fact that this was Notre Dame, and seasons like this are not ordained in the gospel. But it was even worse than that, because what had become clear by then was that Charlie Weis—in his third season at Notre Dame’s head football coach after serving as offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots—brought the backlash upon himself. He had spent the past several years attempting to brand himself as some sort of haughty genius; he treated the entire enterprise of college football as if it were a game played by toddlers that a man who had coached Tom Brady would navigate would preternatural ease. In the wake of his hiring, he declared to his own players that they would have a “decided schematic advantage.” In August of 2006, as Notre Dame prepared to embark upon a 10-win season under Weis, The New York Times wrote that “Charlie Weis has returned Notre Dame to relevancy…the schemes and the discipline Weis has installed have revived past glories.”
And then came 2007, when it became clear that Weis was a complete grifter who had no real idea what he was doing.
“Arrogant as hell,” one high school coach said of Weis, and when journalist Teddy Greenstein pointed out that Weis’s record was similar to that of famously failed Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust, one alum told him, “At least (Faust) was a good guy.”
Over the course of his five years at Notre Dame, Charlie Weis won 35 games and lost 27. His early success was illusory. Through all of it, he acted, to put it simply, like an absolute and total jerk. And none of this might have mattered if Weis actually won football games, but he didn’t.
I still don’t know if Weis’ cocksure buffoonery was an attempt to burnish Notre Dame’s shrinking profile in the sport—if Weis wasn’t actually a buffoon, in other words, but was just playing the role of a buffoon—but either way, he committed the unforgivable sin of blending arrogance with incompetence, which arguably makes him the worst college football coaching hire of the 21st century. He was a guy who constructed his own myth and then tore it apart over the course of five short years.
II.
“The giant edifice of fraud that is Weis’ reputation is actually a series of smaller frauds piled on top of each other…The myth grew after Weis was appointed at Notre Dame and started proclaiming his own brilliance.”—Jonathan Chait, Slate, 2007
“Americans already understood Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves willing to tolerate that. But now they are coming to believe that he is inept. In American politics, that is an unforgivable sin.”—Peter Wehner and Robert P. Beschel Jr., The Atlantic, 2025.
III.
Six years ago, back when Lincoln Riley was considered the best young football coach in America, I spoke to a number of people who know him about what set him apart. He had cultivated an image as an intellectual football coach, a guy who didn’t need to scream and yell but could cultivate brilliance through the sheer power of his schemes. He came across as a normal dude who just happened to have a beautiful football mind, and after his career ran its course at Oklahoma, he took the job at USC, and it appeared that he would be the one who would restore that program to the level of competitiveness it reached under Pete Carroll and John McKay.
And yet over the course of three years, it hasn’t worked out that way. Riley won 11 games his first season; he won eight in his second season, and seven in his third. He appears to be walking backward, and no one really knows why, and this fall he’s started to appear on those preseason “Coaching Hot Seat” lists, even though he probably makes too much money and has too big of a contract buyout to actually be on the hot seat. But the point is, the perception has changed. “USC football has become a mirage,” wrote Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke. “The greatness is gone. The new tradition is mediocrity. The new heritage is irrelevance.”
Leave behind for a moment that this is the kind of naked hyperbole that made Plaschke an Around the Horn legend. It’s proof that the perception Riley cultivated early in his career is now gone, and that is a problem, because you cannot foster a reputation as a schematic genius and then suddenly appear lost in the wilderness against teams with supposedly inferior football minds. At some point, people start to see through these things, and it is often much easier to see in sports, where everything is measured in zero-sum results, but it’s true in the wider world, as well.
If you cultivate a reputation as an arrogant genius, you’d better justify that arrogance; if you cultivate a reputation as a wonky deep-thinker, you’d better show your intellectual superiority; and if you cultivate a reputation as a savvy businessman—especially if it’s built on an edifice of fraud—then perhaps, if you prove incapable of actually stewarding a major economy, people will begin to recognize that it was all a mirage. Perhaps they will begin to recognize that the greatness was never there in the first place.
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The thing I found fascinating with Charlie, he won with the previous coaches recruit. Once he had to do that part of the job as well, he showed his ineptitude.
I think Trump described himself as a "stable genius." To me, he is clearly incompetent with a few examples being tariffs, his siding with Russia after they invaded Ukraine and pardoning Jan 6 insurrectionists. I guess this qualifies him as an arrogant loser.