Easy bein' green

SOUTH BEND, Ind. – Not that the losses were ever all that fun for Notre Dame fans, but the irrelevancy seemed to hurt most. For a decade, the Irish didn’t even talk a good game, the once proud program emasculated by coaches who either wanted extreme humility (Ty Willingham) or used excessive excuses (Bob Davie).

Either way Notre Dame stopped being Notre Dame – the delightfully polarizing team that for nearly a century had stirred the greatest of passions among fans and foes alike.

Gone were the days of Notre Dame not just being preseason national championship contenders but also boldly embracing such expectations.

And then coach Charlie Weis strolled into his media day press conference Sunday, on the eve of a season in which Notre Dame is in everyone’s top five (if not top one), boasts a Heisman favorite, has the nation’s top recruit lined up and, just like old times, isn’t apologizing for any of it.

“National championship,” said quarterback Brady Quinn, the school’s Heisman Trophy candidate. “That’s the only thing we are thinking about.”

Notre Dame is bold and back in every conceivable way, not just as a team capable of winning it all but also as a program that has shed its woe-is-me skin and is full of the swagger missing since Lou Holtz was stomping the South Bend sidelines.

And college football is better for it. College football always is better when Notre Dame is Notre Dame.

This rebirth is the work of Weis, the second-year coach who overnight didn’t just turn the Notre Dame offense into a potent, powerful force but who also restored the appropriate arrogance that makes people either love, hate, love to hate or hate to love the Irish.

“I think that good or bad, we are judged … like we almost have an attitude, like we are holier than thou, which we certainly are not,” said Weis, who returns 16 starters from a team that went 9-3 last season.

“I try to use the analogy,” he continued. “Growing up a Yankee fan, I always found no matter where you went, people had an opinion on the Yankees. They either liked them or disliked them. I think that's very similar to what we have to deal with.

“We just try to do things right. I would like to think that people would respect us for the way we run the program.

"[But] whether you like us or not is really not that relevant.”

The people who love the Irish – they annually rank as the nation’s most popular team – eat up this stuff. The people that despise the Irish – they annually rank as the nation’s most hated team – just throw up.

But that’s the beauty of Notre Dame, which through decades of wins and hype and, depending on your perspective, accurate media portrayals or insufferably syrupy coverage (Hollywood included), is a program like no other.

At least until Holtz left in 1996, and it went through eight seasons of .577 play and, worse, a defeatist attitude that drove the fan base nuts.

Davie spent five seasons telling everyone that the entrance requirements were too stringent, the schedule too tough and the expectations too grand. Willingham spent three more projecting the most humble of humility.

Not only did Notre Dame stop playing like Notre Dame, it stopped acting like Notre Dame. Even beating the Irish ceased being all that enjoyable.

But Weis has changed everything. Not just the offense, which immediately set a school scoring record. Not just the aggressive recruiting – he scored a commitment from quarterback Jimmy Clausen, the No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2008. And not just expectations – No. 3 in the preseason coaches’ poll.

But the attitude.

“There has been a lot of hype around the season,” Quinn said matter-of-factly. “We’re trying to turn this hype into fact.”

Weis is just as confident as you’d expect a four-time Super Bowl winning protégé of Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells would be if he stepped down to college football where the coaching competition is, well, not always elite.

Weis is a better coach than most and, quite possibly, as good as the college game has. Time will tell, but at the very least, he enters every game projecting a confidence from the sideline that wasn’t seen around here for a decade.

“I really haven’t done much yet,” Weis said. “Hopefully in 10, 15 years this phase of my career will be deemed a success.”

Understand that Weis didn’t sit there on Sunday declaring that Notre Dame was a lock to go unbeaten. He didn’t claim his was the only program where kids actually take real classes. He didn’t rip on anybody.

To the contrary. He was respectful, self-deprecating and mostly just honest. He mainly talked about how he was going to demand more and punish overconfidence and how he solely was focused on beating Georgia Tech in the season opener.

“Ask Auburn about that one,” Weis said in reference to Tech’s upset of the Tigers in last year’s season opener.

But Weis wears his confidence on his sleeve, and his belief that something special is developing here is obvious. He is a straight shooter, a football coach’s football coach. He talks just like Parcells, in short, common-sense sentences in which he doesn’t overhype or underplay anything.

He isn’t afraid to tell you who’s good and who isn’t. He thinks his team is good.

This plays to the delight of Notre Dame fans who had begun to wonder if this ever was possible again. And it continues to play to the horror of Notre Dame haters who see a program with too many advantages (an NBC deal, favorable BCS position, no conference) and too much gumption.

But isn’t that the fun part? Isn’t that what Notre Dame is for, so that win or lose whatever it does this year matters?

“I don’t care what anybody else thinks,” Weis said. “I care about Notre Dame.”

And once again, so do you.