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After a great first season, times have been tough for Charlie Weis at Notre Dame, and he may need to make some changes if he hopes to last beyond next season.

Since then? Notre Dame has lost a lot more games and the program has been a lot less fun to be around. In 2005, Samardzija gave a post-game interview to NBC sideline reporter Lewis Johnson that was so brazenly enthusiastic, so effortlessly genuine, that even Mark May might have smiled at his zeal.

Those days are gone. Players now must sift between what they honestly feel and what they are permitted to say every time they open their mouths. Freshmen are completely off-limits to the media. Notre Dame, with the highest graduation rate of any FBS school, does not trust in the intelligence of its freshmen to deal with the media while almost every other FBS school does?

That’s not just an insular fourth-estate gripe. That’s a symptom of a greater ill plaguing Weis’ tenure: an absence of spontaneity, of joy, of freedom. How does Weis expect leaders to emerge from his roster if he treats his players like children?

Everything is too micro-managed. In his statement Swarbrick said, “We are examining every aspect of the program and will make changes wherever we think they are needed."

Here are a few minor suggestions:

• Make freshmen available to the media and trust all of your players simply to be themselves. You might be surprised not only at how well they acquit themselves, but at how much more latitude the media gives them.
• Curtail the Friday night pep rallies to one or two per season. Sure, they’re primarily for the alums and for those who’ve made a Notre Dame weekend a holy pilgrimage, but why must the players endure it? Hard as they try, they cannot hide the bored looks on their faces. You cannot manufacture emotion on a weekly basis.
• If you’re going to allow music at Thursday afternoon practices, you might let the people who requested it (the players) have a little more say in the playlist. Weis, by playing Bon Jovi and Springsteen almost exclusively, may not realize it, but he is telling his team, “Even this is about me.” It’s a minor detail, but it speaks volumes to the players and assistant coaches (almost as loud as the volume of the actual music itself).
• Be yourself.

Two sets of digits as we close. The first is 41-3. That was the score, after three quarters, of Notre Dame’s 2006 contest with Penn State. The Nittany Lions looked hapless that afternoon, their head coach Joe Paterno, nearing 80 years old, appeared on his way out.

Two years later, the Nittany Lions, with five starters who also started against the Irish that day in South Bend, are 11-1 and headed to the Rose Bowl. The Fighting Irish, as cluelessly as they played in 2007 and as listlessly as they performed the second half of this season, are nearing a bountiful era.

Of course, how many other coaches, provided Notre Dame’s talent, would build a better football team than the one Weis and his staff have constructed? The short answer is “many.” However, Notre Dame has already fired three head coaches (Bob Davie, George O’Leary and Ty Willingham) this decade. Another quickie divorce would not only destabilize the program, it would move it past embarrassing to full-on Zsa Zsa status.

The second digit is simply 1. One, as in the number of 100-yard rushing games Irish running backs had this season. Armando Allen gained 134 yards in a September win vs. Purdue, and that accounts for this team’s lone 100-yard game. Twenty schools finished with a worse rushing offense than did Notre Dame this season, but nine of them had more than a single 100-yard rushing game from an individual.

Most of the schools that failed to post a single 100-yard rusher were synonymous with this season’s FBS laughing stocks: Washington, Washington State, UCLA and SMU. It doesn’t matter the size of your playbook if you cannot run the football. You don’t have to have a Woody Hayes offensive mentality to appreciate that.

Doug Flutie, speaking on ESPN’s "College Football Live" on Wednesday, noted that the Irish often seem physically overmatched against their opponents. That was a kind way to put it. I’ll add this: I’m still waiting to see an Irish player in the Weis era with bigger guns — and more heart — than his first quarterback.

Can the fat guy coach? Charlie Weis will have at least one more season to answer that question.

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