Eric Hansen

SOUTH BEND, Ind. - We know Jimmy Clausen is a leader because that’s what Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis tell us he is.

Behind closed doors, when the cameras are dormant, in team meetings with no witnesses, the magic happens.

Whether it has been more mythology than matter of fact doesn’t matter at this point. In the ND football program’s latest misstep into national scrutiny, Clausen will be forced to distinguish himself as either a passer or a quarterback.

There is a distinct difference.

In Saturday’s 17-0 Boston College massacre, Clausen’s body language was as alarming as his career-high four interceptions. The once-plucky freshman, who never seemed to flinch amid the losing and the lack of pass protection last season, oozed frustration Saturday night in Chestnut Hill, Mass. Not only were his stats regressing, his maturity was as well.

Just a bad day at the office? Perhaps.

Still, Notre Dame saw fit that on Clausen’s most-implosive night as a college quarterback to date he needed to be off-limits to the media. The next day, Weis revealed Clausen had been battling the flu over the weekend as well as rib, toe and finger injuries.

Juxtapose that to last Thursday night in Cleveland, where Clausen’s predecessor at Notre Dame, Brady Quinn, made his first NFL start, for the Browns against the Denver Broncos.

What the wobbly Cleveland defense didn’t ravage of a storybook debut -- coughing up 21 fourth-quarter points, Quinn’s offensive supporting cast did in a 34-30 loss. That included tight end Kellen Winslow letting a fourth-down pass slide through his hands on the truncated comeback drive.

"I told everyone this that I talked to after the game, 'This is on me. This loss is flat on me.'" Quinn said. "I know that I'm good enough, that whenever we have the ball at the end of the game -- no matter how much time is left, no matter what the circumstances -- that I can make a play to let us win.

"That's what I believe. That, hopefully, is what our team will understand and they'll have the same faith in me, and it will trickle down the fans. And we'll start to kind of turn things around."

If Notre Dame (5-4) is going to turn its own things around to the point where the Sun Bowl will drool over the Irish, where another vaunted recruiting class won’t hemorrhage, where Weis won’t spend each and every day of his offseason defending and spinning, it is leadership that will rescue it.

Maybe it’s coincidence, maybe it’s not, but in ND’s latest win-or-lose-face situation against Boston College, Irish senior wideout and offensive captain David Grimes had the same number of catches that ND senior linebacker and defensive captain Maurice Crum had tackles.

Zero.

Which is all the more reason Clausen, the face of Notre Dame football for the past two years, must also become its conscious and its heart.

“We actually talked about that in the last two minutes of the game, so I pulled him over and the other quarterbacks came over,” Weis said. “I started talking about what was going to have to happen with the team as the week goes on, starting right after the game is over, because when that game is over, everyone is going to be in the tank for a while.

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“But the bottom line is when you come back and go back to work, people are always looking for the so called leaders of the team and how they're going to react, and I think regardless of where you are in age and years in school, when you're the quarterback of the team, especially a quarterback whose status has risen as the years go on, I think it's important for them to see how you respond. People always look and see how these guys respond.

“That was really the point that I was making with him. I think that it's never too early for a quarterback to show that he's going to respond in a favorable manner.”

And who does Clausen look to for a model of leadership? It’s strange, almost sad that he has never sought out Quinn. When Quinn was a college quarterback, he picked the brains of Tom Brady, Brett Favre and Peyton Manning among others.

There’s Joe Montana and Joe Theismann in the Irish family tree -- hardly average Joes. But his most impacting leadership model in this time and space is likely to be Weis.

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Weis, at first begrudgingly but eventually convincingly, reinvented himself this offseason. The only downside of which is that he hasn’t seemed to move his sagging bottom line. So Sunday night, he dipped one hand back into the past and announced that from this point forward, the former offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots would become heavily involved again in the Irish offense.

But it will take more than that to shift the momentum. It will take true leadership – not posing and posturing, not staging and scripting.

You can’t fake greatness, nor can you coerce it. It’s Weis’ job to bring that out now in both his overachievers and his prodigies alike.

Flash back to Quinn in Cleveland, where he talked about his own latest coming of age.

"I'm a man of faith,” he said. “I believe God wouldn't put me in the position to have this opportunity if I wasn't ready for it."

In South Bend, it’s Weis’ time, ready or not.

And Jimmy Clausen is watching.