Eric Hansen

SOUTH BEND, Ind. - Charlie Weis promised himself there was no turning back.

And then the Notre Dame head football coach announced it to the media last offseason, with plenty of frequency, emphasis and decibels to the point that if he did renege, his credibility would be scarred.

On Nov. 11 the promise came unraveled. Well, sort of.

That's when Weis announced he would call the offensive plays against Navy. He got off to a good start as a play caller this season as the Irish beat the Mids, 27-21 but losses to Syracuse and USC followed.

With Weis calling the plays for the Irish on the sidelines again, just as he did his first three seasons at ND, what's ahead for offensive coordinator Michael Haywood?

His role is somewhat undefined.

Weis, though, emphasized this wasn’t necessarily a long-term arrangement. After admitting  that getting more involved in the offense would be an inviting notion and then putting some substance but few details behind it, Weis suddenly announced that the reason for the shift was a death in the Haywood family.

"When there's a problem, and it's in an area where you can be part of the solution, I believe you help go fix it," Weis said, reflecting on a punchless third quarter Nov. 1 against Pittsburgh that laid the groundwork for a quadruple-overtime collapse, and four quarters of the same in a 17-0 offensive train wreck at Boston College on Nov 8.

Haywood confirmed that his 24-year-old female cousin recently passed away on and he spent Wednesday and Thursday of the week leading up to the Navy game in his hometown of Houston for the funeral before rejoining the team in Baltimore.

“We said, ‘Let's just get through Navy,’ ” Weis iterated when asked if Haywood would go back to being offensive coordinator in name only. “I want to give him his time. And he really needs a little time here. I think that, having gone through a death during a football season myself at one time, you show up for the game, but you're kind of in a fog. You're there, but you're kind of not there at the same time.”

When pressed as to whether the move would have been made had Haywood not had to deal with a family tragedy, Weis intentionally grounded the question.

“Let's not go hypothetically,” he said. “I don't know the answer to the question, because I already knew on Friday. This is before we'd even played the (BC) game. This was an issue that we had talked about. And we said we'd revisit it.

“So I don't know the answer. What if we had won by 40? I'd still be running the offense this week. It wouldn't have made a difference. I'd still be doing the same thing, based off of what we're dealing with this week.”

In Weis’ three years of head coach/offensive coordinator/offensive play-caller, he presided over both the second-biggest single-season offensive improvement in ND football history (going from 81st to 10th nationally in total offense in 2005) and its largest-ever slide (23rd to 119th in 2007). But one of brightest lines on his resume when the job opened in late November of 2004 was his offensive prowess.

The New England Patriots offensive coordinator’s Super Bowl rings glistened even more when juxtaposed against five years of languid offense in South Bend. ND’s high-water mark nationally in total offense from 2000-2004 was 76th.

What Weis needs to look at is an offense that amassed 430 total yards in four straight games for the first time since late in the Lou Holtz Era (1995) earlier this season but has regressed dramatically since. And the most visible and troubling sign of the slippage is quarterback Jimmy Clausen's slide in passing efficiency.

So maybe it’s a matter of tweaking, not an overhaul or a purge.

The defense, meanwhile, hasn’t put up the monster numbers in terms of sacks and tackles for loss but it’s kept ND in every game. So a little less attention by Weis on that side of the ball in practice at this juncture doesn’t figure to derail the defense’s consistency or progress.

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