Weis: Too many ND assistants wanted to use jobs as 'steppingstone'
Charlie Weis has a regret about the composition of his assistant coaching staff at Notre Dame.
Weis told the Little Rock Touchdown Club on Tuesday that his Notre Dame teams weren't as successful as they could have been because he had too many assistants that wanted to use their jobs as a step for bigger ones.
Really. From ArkansasOnline.com:
Weis said his struggles at Notre Dame could be traced to the composition of his coaching staff. Three of his assistants -- Michael Haywood (Miami, Ohio), Rob Ianello (Akron) and Brian Polian (Nevada) -- eventually left to run their own programs.
"I hired too many people that wanted to use the school as a steppingstone for a head coaching job," Weis said.
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Weis was 35-27 at Notre Dame. He had success in his first two years with the school, going 19-6. But then the wheels fell off. He was 16-21 over the next three seasons.
His reasoning about his assistant coaches is, well, a tad ridiculous. A lot of people, not just coaches, want to succeed at their current positions to move up on their career ladders. You can't blame assistant coaches for wanting to have better jobs eventually.
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And if that was the reason for his struggles at Notre Dame, it stands to reason that he would have had a modicum of success at Kansas, right? After spending 2010 and 2011 as an assistant coach with the Kansas City Chiefs and Florida Gators – yes we're not forgetting that Weis made the step up a second time from assistant coach to head coach – he went 6-22 at Kansas before he was fired four games in to the 2014 season. He's still making money from both Notre Dame and Kansas via the buyouts in his contracts.
Sorry Charlie, we're not buying this one. Unless you're saying in a roundabout way that your assistants were too much like yourself in wanting to move from assistant coaching jobs to head coaching jobs. That's a theory at least worth considering.
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Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
