Who Will be the Next Coach at Notre Dame

Kelly would be an OK hire. Not a bad hire, but a "we'll have to wait and see"

Meyer, Stoops would be no-brainers, but neither is insane enough to leave their current jobs.

I think Harbaugh would be crazy to leave Stanford. Things didn't work out too well the last time ND hired a Stanford coach.

Johnson would definitely be the best way to go for Notre Dame.

 

Maybe Crazy Al just has a thing for the chubby buzz-cut type.

 

so when do we expect an announcement from the Golden Dummmers? I thought the whole thing was to push Weiss out now so they can get someone in right away to recruit? It seems there is a "short list" but nowhere near they should be in the hiring process at this point.

 

Um, he was fired like three days ago and there's another weekend of games to go.

And it's Weis.

 

To my knowledge, he's not even a candidate that Notre Dame is considering. Maybe the AD doesn't like the offense. That doesn't mean he doesn't think it's "glamorous" enough. Maybe he doesn't think that the players on the current roster could win in a gimmick offense (see: Michigan). I don't know.

And my criticism isn't criticism of Johnson, per se, as much as it is the flawed basis for which I think people are advocating his candidacy - i.e. that he wins games with lesser offensive talent. That along with the insinuation, even by Johnson supporters, that a Johnson hire would be a long-due acknowledgment by Notre Dame that they should get out of the business of trying to win national championships and into the business of being a scrappy, undermanned underdog.

 

Weis was fired three days ago; they have to be able to stick to the plausible version of events that they didn't talk to anybody until he had been terminated. My bet is no announcement will be made until a couple days after bowl invitations go out -- that will have some effect on how soon the new guy can take over.

Assuming they want to hire somebody coaching in a bowl game, I think ND will be OK with him staying at the current school through the bowl game -- the exposure the coach gets from a bowl game appearance will probably be enough of a boost in recruiting to offset a 3-4 week delay in his actually arriving on campus.

If the current school doesn't like that arrangement and says, "have your office cleaned out by noon tomorrow," ND just says, "fine," and moves on.

One drawback with Paul Johnson (and the other run-oriented prospects, such as Ferentz) would be that his offense is DRAMATICALLY different than Weis's, probably necessitating a 2-4 year roster-turnover process before he got "his players" in there.

Although presumably he would handle it better than, for example, Rich Rodriguez, whose strategy apparently was to blast everything down to the bricks before embarking on his grand rebuilding plan. With Weis (supposedly) pulling in Top-20 classes the last couple of years, ND fans aren't going to want to go 4-8 for two or three years before a new coach gets "his players" on the field.

Most of the other leading prospects -- Kelly, Stoops, Fitzgerald, Harbaugh -- run some variation of the spread, while somewhat different from Weis's offense it would still be close enough that a wholesale revamping of the roster would probably not be needed.

 

Exactly. He won at Navy, which has (along with the AFA and USMA) admissions standards, code of conduct standards, and year-round, 24/7 demands on players that dwarf those at any other American university.

He would win there. But he also would suffer many of the boosters, either.

 

Apparently Johnson signed a contract extension at Georgia Tech this fall and also has made it pretty well-known out there that he's happy at Georgia Tech and isn't planning to leave any time soon. He's paid well, too. Of course, everybody says that until the big boys come knocking at their door, but I'm sure via back channels the AD's know who is being serious and who is just saying the right things. Probably not worth it for Notre Dame to take the "Paul Johnson rejected Notre Dame!" bath if it is 99.999 percent sure he's not leaving where he's at.

 

Paul Johnson wouldn't do well at Notre Dame and here is why - it is more than just a coaching job.

You better be good with alumns, you better be good with the administration and you better be good at raising funds and being a spokesman because if you don't you will get chewed up and spit out.

Johnson is a great football coach but from everything I've read about him he doesn't like all that other stuff and he can be very abrasive with administrative types and others. I've read this - I don't know it so don't jump down my throat if you have different experiences.

Notre Dame needs more than a great X's and O's type.

 

There are guys who are coaching this weekend who might be candidates (Meyer and Kelly, to name two). They'll wait at least til Sunday.

 

My guess ... and it's no more than just that ... is that the amount of crap the alums will put up with is pretty much proportional to the number of wins the coach leads them to. Especially after the last three coaches.

 

I don't think the timing is right for Johnson right now. When the next guy fails, he'd be a logical candidate, but I think even Johnson would want to stay out and at least use some of the kids he recruited to Tech and see what he can do with his own kids.