Leaders on Irish defense among 88 players to receive preseason consideration for college football's best defensive player award May 12, 2008
DALLAS - University of Notre Dame safety David Bruton and linebacker Maurice Crum Jr. have both been named to the watch list for the 2008 Bronko Nagurski Trophy, the Football Writers Association of America announced Monday. They are two of 88 players selected to the watch list of the Nagurski Trophy that is awarded annually to the best defensive player in college football.
Bruton is coming off a breakthrough season in 2007 in which he ranked third on the team with 85 tackles and is the team's leading returning tackler in 2008. Voted a 2008 team captain by his teammates at the conclusion of spring practices, Bruton started 11 of 12 games appeared last season and led the team with three interceptions while adding one sack, 5.5 tackles for loss, three passes broken up, one forced fumble and one fumble recovery.
Crum was named to the Nagurski Trophy Watch List for the second straight year and was named a team captain for another season. Crum becomes the 17th two-time captain in the football program's storied history. He is coming off a season that saw him record 84 tackles adding 4.5 tackles for loss, one sack, two interceptions, four passes broken up, three forced fumbles and two fumble recoveries. Crum has 241 career tackles and needs 54 stops to enter Notre Dame's top-10 list for career tackles. He has started all 37 games over the last three seasons and holds the team's longest active streak for consecutive games played and started. The FWAA All-America Committee selects the Bronko Nagurski Trophy winner from the association's 11-man All-America defensive team in November. The watch list was developed by the FWAA All-America committee with the help of the schools and conferences. The Charlotte Touchdown Club will hold the 2008 banquet on Sunday, Dec. 7, at the Westin Hotel in Charlotte. For the eighth straight season, the FWAA will also pick a Bronko Nagurski Defensive Player of the Week beginning with games on Aug. 30 and running through the middle of November. And a Bronko Nagurski Legends Award winner will also be selected from the FWAA's 1967 All-America team. The Bronko Nagurski Trophy has been presented since 1993 and is awarded in memory of the legendary Nagurski, a former All-America lineman at Minnesota in 1927-29 and a star for professional football's Chicago Bears in the 1930s.
Opinion: You hate Weis, but do you know him?
Notre Dame coach under scrutiny, seen as arrogant
OPINION
By Matt Hayes
updated 10:05 p.m. ET, Thurs., June. 26, 2008
He knows you're coming, and at this point the inevitable has happened. He's stuck with you. For two days, flying thousands of miles in a small private plane with all the comfort of a four-door sedan. The sportswriter vs. Charlie Weis. He'd rather take a sledgehammer to the knees than endure this torture.
"I know why you're here," he says.
The natural response: Why?
"To see if I'm human," he replies.
Here he is, everyone. Charlie Weis: the most hated man in college sports.
From his arrogance to his controversial hiring at Notre Dame, to a contract extension seven games into his first season, to a third season that was the most humiliating at Notre Dame in decades.
Charlie Weis doesn't do the media. Never has, maybe never will again. You see him on the dais in those staged news conferences with a pressed white shirt, blue and gold tie and ND logos adorning the background. It's questions and answers and X's and O's, and he -- like nearly every other coach in every other sport -- has complete control.
Now it's Charlie Weis unplugged on a two-day booster tour. He has nowhere to go and no public relations people. And no excuses.
It's raw, it's honest, it's compelling. And maybe, just maybe, Charlie Weis isn't the man you think he is. The father, the philanthropist, the friend. The guy from the Jersey Shore who married a Jersey girl and just happens to coach the highest-profile sports team in any league at any level.
"The biggest problem I have," Weis says, "is people who don't know me, who have never spoken to me, think I'm an asshole."
And so it begins. A wise man once said life is all about the journey. Yeah? Let him take a few spins in Weis' seat. Gut checks and gut punches. Unrestrained joy and unfathomable sorrow. A life only few could imagine and life tests few can comprehend.
Weis is the first to admit he has made mistakes. And you know what? He's going to make more -- just like everyone else. How fitting, then, that the lowest point of his professional career might be, for him, the beginning of figuring out the good and bad of the beast that is coaching Notre Dame. A 3-9 season, including a loss to Air Force and the first loss to Navy in 44 years, offered the perfect pause. For the first time since Weis stepped on campus in South Bend, for the first time since he accepted the job after the unpopular firing of Tyrone Willingham and the publicly failed courtship of Urban Meyer, he had a chance to step back and assess his program.
A series of disconnects — from performance on the field to perceptions off it — had been overshadowed by the daily grind of playing and recruiting and trying to get better. Only after the program's worst season since 1963, only after some serious soul searching, did the scope of it clearly come into focus.
And only now, for the first time, we see the real Charlie Weis. All the warts — and, yes, all the beauty.
"My problem is not scrutiny as a coach, it's scrutiny as a person," Weis says. "Character is important to me. Almost to a person, when people meet me, it's completely 180 degrees different from what they thought. They look at me like they can't believe it. So where is the miscommunication?
"I have to be part of the problem."
Earlier that morning, he fired off a call to his friend Jon Bon Jovi.
Yeah, that Jon Bon Jovi.
"You hear what I'm listening to?" Weis says, the strains of "It's My Life" booming through the speakers of his Cadillac Escalade.
Better stand tall when they're calling you out;
Don't bend, don't break, baby, don't back down.
"Should the casual observer stereotype him, it would be easy to assume that this larger than life flattop with the patience of a grenade could take his whistle and ... does that fit the profile?" Bon Jovi says. "The Charlie Weis I know loves his friends, loves his family and really loves his job. That says more to me than anything else."
The brutal reality of reflection and self-help is that there's no buffer, no protection from what is. When Weis decided to examine it all, it began in the heart of it all: the Notre Dame family.
Earlier this year, the NCAA adopted new recruiting regulations aimed at keeping head coaches on campus during the spring evaluation period. But instead of sitting in South Bend, Weis decided to see the masses and visit the hugely popular and fanatical ND booster clubs. Other than an annual appearance at the Rockne Club in Chicago, Weis has steered clear of booster functions -- not necessarily by choice but by mandate -- and mingling with ND clubs, which stretch as far away as Japan and as far to the unthinkable as Iraq. So many viewed this 12-club outreach as a public relations ploy, a chance for Weis to soothe the fans reeling from the pitiful season and the reality that their new coach had just one more win than Willingham after Year 3. Willingham didn't make it to Year 4 because of wins and losses -- not enough of the former, too many of the latter.
"From the day Charlie agreed to be our coach, (ND president) Father (John) Jenkins and I were adamant that he focus on football," says former Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White, who earlier this month accepted the athletic director job at Duke. "We wanted him to get totally immersed in football, in building the team and recruiting. We didn't want him pulled in so many different directions. The booster tour was totally his decision."
The plane lands in Houston for the first stop on the two-day trip, and Weis sits in a chair at a small regional airport while waiting for a car to take him downtown for a luncheon. He gets a call on his phone that shows only six digits on the caller ID. It's the White House.
Yep, the White House.
Weis, 52, has been appointed to the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities. His 13-year-old daughter, Hannah, who has global developmental delay, now has a worldwide advocate.
The moment is overwhelming.
"I'm pretty pumped," Weis says, his eyes welling with tears. "People say to me, 'Boy, last year must have been the hardest year of your life.' Let's keep football in perspective."
Nearly 13 years ago and seven months into her pregnancy -- with her husband's coaching career picking up steam as a hot assistant under Bill Parcells in New England -- Maura Weis was told the baby she was carrying had polycystic kidney disease. The daughter they dreamed of, the baby they sang to night after night while rubbing Maura's belly, would arrive and die, doctors predicted, a few days after birth.
Eight weeks into her life, tiny Hannah Weis had major surgery: She had one kidney removed and the other reconstructed -- and already was beating the odds.
"She was our miracle baby," Maura says.
Less than 16 months later, she was gone -- retreating into the neurological nightmare of what they thought was autism. Charlie was at a Jets practice -- he had followed Parcells to New York in 1997 -- when doctors told Maura that Hannah wouldn't develop mentally and physically like other children and would struggle to communicate and engage others socially. And then it got worse. Ten years after Hannah's diagnosis of autism -- after Charlie's career had blossomed from rising NFL coordinator to the best job in college sports, after the Weis family had battled with and for Hannah on a daily basis -- tests revealed she had electrical status epilepticus. So it was a rare seizure disorder, not autism, that had forced their daughter into a world of her own, deteriorating her mental, physical and social abilities. Medication to limit the hundreds of daily seizures -- most so minute they can be traced only by an electroencephalogram -- has all but eliminated them.
"But," Weis says, "the damage has been done."
That's why the call from the office of the President meant so much, why Weis fidgeted in his chair when Maura wasn't answering her phone and couldn't hear the news that Hannah and every other child and adult with special needs now have a President's Committee on their side.
Maura, though, was a little sidetracked: The first two of 16 residential homes are near completion in South Bend as part of Hannah and Friends Farm, a 30-acre residential community for adults with special needs. And Maura is at the center of the project with her Hannah and Friends Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has raised nearly $2 million toward the farm. The plan includes a lake and fishing dock and a stable with horses. There's a sledding hill for cold winter months and a greenhouse.
There's a farm and a recreation center, and the first two homes will be ready to house eight adults (four per house) this fall. This is the Weis' mission in life; Charlie's job as coach at Notre Dame merely drives the train.
Five years ago, not long after Weis nearly died from complications of gastric bypass surgery in 2002 -- he was in a coma for two weeks and received the Catholic sacrament of last rites -- he and Maura were sitting on a beach in South Carolina when their eyes opened and their world expanded.
"I told Charlie, 'You could've died in that hospital,' " Maura says. "And what would we have done for others? We're fortunate that we can take care of Hannah. What about those who can't?"
Earlier this year, when the South Bend Challenger Baseball League -- made up of children with special needs -- was searching for a place to play its twice-weekly summer games, Weis got his family involved. Last year he had a regulation baseball field built for his son, Charlie Jr., on the family's five-acre lot near South Bend as part of a recreation complex that includes a playground for Hannah and horse stables and paddocks for Maura. With the Challenger League needing a home, Maura went right to Charlie Jr. -- the same 15-year-old whom message board nuts and talk radio gabsters rip for standing on the sideline at Notre Dame games (he's just the spoiled kid of an arrogant father, right?).
"She's my sister, and those are her friends," Charlie Jr. says. "Of course I'm going to let them use my field."
Every Wednesday and Sunday, more than 50 kids from the Challenger League descend on the Weis household. Baseball and burgers, care and camaraderie.
"Hannah is not our guardian angel," Weis says. "She's our guiding angel."
These booster club meetings aren't rocket science. Fly in, meet and greet, eat a meal and talk about the team. Portland is no different from Houston and will be no different from Ventura County, Calif. The object is twofold: get everyone excited about the coming season and help the club with fundraising.
But every so often something unique happens that makes it all worthwhile. Minutes before Weis stands to speak in Portland, a young boy with leukemia walks over and asks for an autograph. Weis pulls him aside for a few minutes but won't reveal their conversation. As Weis walks to the stage, the boy's mother says, "He didn't tell me what he said ... but he asked how I was holding up. No one ever asks about me."
Later, when asked again about the meeting, Weis says, "The last thing I want is for this story to come off as self-serving. I have faults just like everyone else."
He's arrogant and says things most coaches won't. Some call it hubris or bravado; others call it confidence. When Weis first arrived at Notre Dame he promised his players they'd have a decided schematic advantage because of the guy on the sideline.
Needless to say, that didn't go over well.
"Win a championship in the college game," says one BCS coach. "Those NFL rings don't mean anything here. It's a completely different game."
On and off the field.
When Weis began this offseason of soul-searching, he sent a letter to Dr. Richard Pierce, a revered professor of history at Notre Dame who specializes in African American, urban and civil rights history and social and political protest. Weis wanted an idea of how he was perceived.
He got more than he could imagine.
Pierce relayed anecdotes from others about interactions with Weis. They talked -- "as colleagues at universities should," says Pierce -- about strengths and faults and finding ways to move on and move forward.
"Charlie didn't understand what got him in trouble were offhand comments and people's perceptions," Pierce says. "Those interactions you have with people -- be it the media, a campus police officer, a food service worker -- spread like a virus. And he had no way to combat it."
Maybe that's why after two straight BCS bowl appearances to begin his tenure at Notre Dame, one bad season raised bad feelings across campus. Or maybe those two BCS games simply hid something that was there from Day 1.
"I don't care that they said it, I care why they said it," Weis says. "If I said something to insult someone, I owe them an apology. I'm not a monster; I'm a husband and a father."
Minutes after Weis helped auction off the final prize at the Ventura County ND Club, he was given a plaque and a certificate for a week of free surfing lessons. It fell in line with the "CW" branding iron he was given in Houston and the aged bottle of Merlot in Portland.
"I don't think you're going to see me on a surfboard," Weis quipped.
The crowd ate it up. At the back of the ballroom stood Jim Clausen, father of Irish quarterback Jimmy Clausen and a man who has seen his three quarterback sons all play Division I football at an elite level.
Jimmy, his youngest, easily has the most potential of the three -- and that's saying plenty considering Jim's oldest, Casey, started four years at Tennessee. Jimmy was the nation's No. 1 recruit in 2007, and early in the recruiting process, Weis asked to fly out to California to meet the family.
He was greeted by -- what else? -- more perceptions.
Hours later, Jimmy Clausen committed to Notre Dame -- five months before the start of his senior season.
"I told Charlie, 'I heard you were a pain in the ass,' " Jim Clausen says. "He looked at me and said, 'I heard the same thing about you.' We just laughed."
He's arrogant, all right.
He's human, too.
Notre Dame, NBC extend football contract through 2015
Partnership between the University and network to reach 25 years
June 19, 2008
Press Conference Transcript
The University of Notre Dame and NBC Sports have reached agreement on a new five-year contract giving NBC the rights to televise Irish home football games from 2011 to 2015, extending the partnership between the University and network to 25 years.
A joint announcement of the extension was made Thursday (June 19) by NBC Sports & Olympics chairman Dick Ebersol, NBC Sports president Ken Schanzer and Notre Dame's president, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.
"We are absolutely thrilled to be continuing our landmark agreement with Notre Dame, the most storied brand in college sports," Ebersol said. "This new deal, which will bring us to 25 years as partners, is great tribute to the wonderful relationship that Ken Schanzer has built with the entire Notre Dame community."
"For almost 20 years, the innovative partnership between Notre Dame and NBC has been a valuable relationship for both the University and the network, and we are delighted that it will be extended by another five years," Father Jenkins said. "Our fans and student-athletes have benefited, of course, but, most importantly, it is the general student body that has realized the greatest gains. In a collaboration unlike any other in higher education, revenue derived from the NBC contract has provided millions of dollars in financial aid to thousands of deserving students at Notre Dame, and we are pleased that this support to the academic mission of the University will continue."
Notre Dame head football coach Charlie Weis added: "I'm thrilled on two levels to hear that Notre Dame will maintain its great relationship with NBC. As the head football coach, it is very beneficial for the program to have all of our home games broadcast into every living room in the country for the foreseeable future. As an alumnus, it is great to know that future students at Notre Dame will benefit from this partnership in the form of need-based scholarships."
Each season from 2011 to 2015, NBC will televise seven games at Notre Dame Stadium and an additional eighth off-site game airing in prime time.
Revenues from the NBC contract have played a key role in Notre Dame's financial aid endowment since the start of the relationship in 1991. University officers decided then to use a portion of the football television contract revenue for undergraduate scholarship endowment (not athletic scholarships). To date, some 2,400 Notre Dame undergraduate students have received nearly $26 million in aid.
The University also has committed NBC revenues to endow doctoral fellowships in its Graduate School and MBA scholarships in its Mendoza College of Business.
The revenue generated through the NBC contract is a primary reason why Forbes magazine has recognized the substantial financial contributions made by Irish athletics to the University's academic enterprise. In a 2007 survey, Forbes reported that the Notre Dame football program returns $21.1 million to academic initiatives, a total that is more than the survey's next five programs combined.
NBC has been televising Irish home games since 1991, and this marks the fifth of a series of five-year agreements with Notre Dame. The original agreement covered the seasons from 1991 through 1995. The first five-year extension (announced in 1994) covered 1996 to 2000, the second extension (announced in May '97) covered 2001 to 2005, and the third extension (announced in December '03) covered 2006 to 2010.
Each of the initial three contracts featured a combined 30 home games over each five-year span. When the current contract expires in 2010, NBC will have televised 36 games over five years, due to the addition in several years of a seventh home game and/or an eighth off-site game.
NBC's schedule of Notre Dame home games for the coming season features San Diego State (Sept. 6), Michigan (Sept. 13), Purdue (Sept. 27), Stanford (Oct. 4), Pittsburgh (Nov. 1) and Syracuse (Nov. 22).
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