Mike Celizic

The two winningest teams in college football history bring the losingest records of 2007 to Ann Arbor Saturday. And there may never have been a bigger Michigan-Notre Dame game in the 120 years since the boys from Ann Arbor taught the game to their counterparts in South Bend.

Sure, they’ve played before with a No. 1 ranking at stake, but they’ve both played plenty of games like that against plenty of opponents. What they haven’t done is play when both are an unthinkable 0-2.

They’ve played games with a lot to win, but never one with so much to lose.

You can start with the job of Michigan coach Lloyd Carr, the man who took over from Gary Moeller. Like Bo Schembechler, who hired Carr as an assistant 27 years ago, Carr has become part of the Michigan institution, which is why the administration has always said that when he goes, it will be his choice, not the athletic department’s.

That could — and should — change. It’s been 50 years since Michigan has begun a season 0-3, and the Wolverine faithful, already fed up with his inability to beat Ohio State’s Jim Tressel, are calling for his scalp. If he can’t beat a very weak Notre Dame team, with Penn State up next, he’s facing an 0-4 start. And this is a team that started the season with national championship aspirations.

It’s not all Carr’s fault that the team has failed to meet the expectations of the fans and writers. It lost a ton of talent on defense after last season, and as is now obvious, didn’t deserve its lofty ranking. But he’s not only lost his first two games, he lost the opener in his building to Division I-AA Appalachian State. It doesn’t matter that the Mountaineers were champions of their division last year; it’s like a Triple A baseball team beating a major league team in a three-game series; it’s not supposed to happen.

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Notre Dame isn’t going to be hearing the wolves howling for Charlie Weis’ liver. And if it does, it has a lot of reason to ignore the howls, most of them relating to the tens of millions of dollars they guaranteed him after his first year when they gave him a ten-year contract. The school also still hasn’t heard the end of the criticism it got for firing Ty Willingham, Weis’ predecessor, after his third year with two years left to go on his contract.

That isn’t to say Weis doesn’t have a lot on the line. First is history.

Most of Notre Dame’s great coaches — Knute Rockne, Frank Leahy, Ara Parseghian, Lou Holtz among them — won some version of a national championship in their third year on the job. Weis isn’t going to do that; he has yet to win a bowl game.

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Weis is facing a different sort of achievement. Notre Dame has had some bad coaches over the years, including Joe Kuharich, Gerry Faust and Bob Davie, but only Davie has ever begun a season with an 0-3 record, and Davie lost his job for doing that. No Notre Dame coach has ever gone 0-4.

The other thing Weis has to lose is the last vestige of his reputation as one of the most brilliant offensive innovators in the game — college or pro.

That’s how he got the ND job — off his work as the offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots’ three Super Bowl winners. His first year at Notre Dame, when he turned Brady Quinn into a record-breaking quarterback, seemed to cement that reputation.