Indecision is the arch-enemy of leadership. It is usually fatal in sports. Having just returned from the golf course, the following analogy occurs to me. Many football coaching decisions are sort of like a slippery, breaking 4-foot par putt. The way to make such putts is to play the ball inside the hole and give it a confident, decisive rap to take the break out of it. But if your confidence falters, if you can't decide how to play it, you (or at least I) inevitably hit the putt tentatively and it breaks out of the hole.
When I think of N.D.'s recent weak coaches -- Davie and Faust -- I am astonished by their constant indecision and the lack of any identity for the team. I recall that when Faust took over, he couldn't make up his mind whether to play sophomore Blair Kiel (who had mostly looked pretty good as a freshman on Devine's Sugar Bowl squad) or 5th year senior Tim Koegel, whom Faust had coached at Moeller. Surely it was a tough decision, but Faust never really made it. Instead he went into the year with a mixed up "every-third-series" quarterback rotation and a 5-6 season ensued.
Davie's chronic indecision was more comical. If you think of all of the offensive "philosophies" that N.D. has supposedly had since 1997, the mind boggles. First we were apparently going to play a "wide open" style of offense with Colletto as the offensive coordinator and Powlus's draft stock would surely soar. A 7-6 season ensued. Powlus was not drafted. Then the offense was apparently supposed to be modified to take advantage of Jarious Jackson's mobility in 1998 though Jackson turned out to be a much better passer than Powlus (Jackson is still in the N.F.L., Powlus never made a regular season roster) and Davie's best season progressed (though against a very easy schedule), until indecision about how to run out the clock against LSU resulted in Jackson's knee injury and the loss to U.S.C. the next week.
In 1999 Davie hired Rogers to turn Jackson into McNabb, when Jackson actually was doing pretty well as Jarious Jackson, and a 5-7 season ensured. Then in 2000 N.D. was going to be an option team again with Battle at QB. That worked reasonably well against Texas A&M but then Davie couldn't quite decide what he wanted to do at the end of the Nebraska game and we wound up giving away a game that should have been won and N.D. was without a quarterback, because it turned out that Battle's wrist had been broken on the first play of the Nebraska game.
The tentative (emphasize tentative) decision for the next week was to have Godsey quarterback the team, even though he had been recruited as a tight end. The Purdue victory the next week was probably the single luckiest win of Davie's career (matched only, perhaps, by the 1998 Purdue win) as Tiller decided to take the ball out of Drew Brees's hands. The next week at M.S.U, however, indecision struck again. Enter LoVecchio in a back-up role, except that after some decent play substituting for Godsey, Davie then stuck Godsey back in the game in a last ditch effort to move the team from the N.D. 2 after having given up a devastating touchdown that spoiled an Irish rally. (Bob Griese in his call of the game said in a rather sympathetic voice: "I bet it looks to Godsey like M.S.U. has 15 defenders on the field.") Davie's indecision would manifest itself in exactly the same way against Stanford in 2001, when he inserted an ice-cold LoVecchio in an effort to move N.D. after having given up another devastating touchdown, with LoVecchio throwing the inevitable interception.
What followed the 2000 M.S.U. game was actually one of the few periods of some actual decisiveness, when Davie and Rogers decided to go with LoVecchio as quarterback. In a sense their hand was forced, because inserting one of the other then-freshmen (Holiday and Clark) would have cost them a year of eligibility. What followed was some quite good play by LoVecchio as N.D. reeled off 7 straight victories and LoVecchio threw 11 touchdowns and only one interception, and ran for 4.2 per carry and two more T.D.s, capped off by a 38-point offensive effort at U.S.C.
Davie, ever the idiot, thought then that he was out of the woods and this belief was no doubt bolstered by his shiny new contract. So, poor preparation for the Fiesta Bowl ensued, followed by one of the most humiliating losses in modern N.D. football.
The hangover was brutal and indecision reigned again, particularly regarding the QB position. Ironically, the indecision was the product of Davie's inability to decide at even the most fundamental level what kind of offense N.D. would have. It's not as though Davie was trying to choose between three similar quarterbacks, he was trying to decide among quarterbacks built and trained to play very different systems, all recruited in the very same class. But that was his choice: Would it be LoVecchio or would it be Holiday? I think that in his heart Davie thought Holiday gave N.D. the best chance to win, particularly at Nebraska, but he just couldn't quite make up his mind to do it. Surely it would've been a tough conversation: "Matt, I know you played well last year, but I think that Carlyle gives us the best chance to win, so he's the starter." Or the other way around: "Carlyle, I know you want to be the starter, but Matt won the job fair and square and he played well last year, so the job is his." But Davie never had either conversation.
The Nebraska game was a very difficult, nearly an impossible, situation. College teams improve dramatically over their first few games, and often teams with senior leadership play much better early in the year, even if other teams catch them later in the year. Nebraska and Fresno St. were two good examples of this in 2001. Playing Nebraska, on the road, when it was Nebraska's third game and N.D.'s first would have required something close to perfection on N.D.'s part; it would have required vision and decisive leadership. Davie reached back into Faust's bag of tricks and came up with the old "bring in the back-up QB in the third series " trick.
It didn't work, of course, but worse yet, N.D. didn't really get anything out of the game in terms of making progress, because all we got was more indecision. LoVecchio, confidence on the wane, started the M.S.U. game and was better than against the Huskers, but it looked again like N.D. was playing its first game. The result was another killer loss to M.S.U.
So LoVecchio was benched in favor of Holiday, but here we were, on the road again, essentially playing our first game again (at least offensively) against a tough opponent, with a frenzied crowd, and N.D. played worse than it played at Nebraska, if that were possible. Holiday was hurt and didn't play the second half and LoVecchio, utterly lacking confidence, looked worse than Holiday did.
Finally, going into the Pittsburgh game, we had a decision: Holiday would play. It essentially took Davie three games to get N.D. to where most schools were after Spring practice. Now I'm not trying to argue the merits of Holiday and LoVecchio and Clark. I don't know who will start for Willingham and Diedrick. But I do know this: a decision will have to be made and if their record is any indication, a decision will be made. Maybe it won't be made after Spring practice, but it will be made well before we play Maryland.
What followed when Davie actually made a decision was a decent stretch of football, at least by Davie's low standards. After going 0-3 as Davie was initiating Hamlet, N.D. was 5-3 after he finally made up his mind. To be sure, the schedule got easier, but perhaps not as dramatically as one might thing. The final Sagarin rankings (N.D. was 42) of N.D.'s first three opponents were: Nebraska 5, M.S.U. 38 and Texas A&M 32. After that: Pitt 45, West Virginia 83, U.S.C. 37, Tennessee 4, Boston College 25, Navy 166, Stanford 14 and Purdue 51. Really the only "gimme" was Navy and perhaps WVU. B.C. and Stanford were statistically tougher opponents than either M.S.U. or A&M and Pitt, U.S.C. and Purdue of roughly the same caliber. Tennessee was statistically tougher than Nebraska.
If you consider the way N.D. played after a decision was made, things got better, particularly on offense. The blowouts ceased. In fact, the frustrating thing was that every one of the three losses in that stretch was a game N.D. could've won. In the case of B.C. and Stanford, they were games that N.D. probably should've won -- though Davies's indecision manifested itself by reinserting LoVecchio in the game in nearly impossible situations that killed N.D.'s last hopes.
But consider, if you will, how N.D. changed statistically from the first three games to the last eight:
First Three Games
Points per Game
N.D.: 7.7
Opp: 23.7
Rushing Average
N.D.: 35.3 carries, 89.7 yards, 2.5 per carry
Opp: 44 carries, 146.3 yards, 3.3 per carry
Passing completion %
N.D.: 49.4
Opp.: 57.6
Passing yards per game
N.D.: 121.3
Opp.: 157.7
Passing yards per pass attempt
N.D. 4.4
Opp.: 7.8
Total plays and yardage
N.D.: 63 plays, 211 yards per game, 3.3 yards per play
Opp: 64.3 plays, 304 yards per game, 4.7 yards per play
Turnover Margin
N.D.: -7
Last Eight Games
Points per Game
N.D.: 23.9
Opp: 18.4
Rushing Average
N.D.: 53 carries, 225.1 yards, 4.3 per carry
Opp: 34.8 carries, 127 yards, 3.7 per carry
Passing completion %
N.D.: 50.3
Opp.: 47.3
Passing yards per game
N.D. 94.1
Opp. 178.3
Passing yards per pass attempt
N.D. 5.6
Opp.: 6.5
Total plays and yardage
N.D.: 69.9 plays, 319 yards per game, 4.6 yards per play
Opp: 63.1 plays, 305.3 yards per game, 4.8 yards per play
Turnover Margin
N.D.: +10
Certainly N.D. was not an offensive juggernaut in the last 8 games, but at least the Irish were running the ball with some effectiveness and not turning it over. Although the passing numbers were anemic for the entire year, the yards-per-pass number improved considerably and actually was on its way to respectability until the 2 for 20 for 64 yards showing against Stanford and the 7 of 15 for 31 yards against Purdue. All sorts of other good things started to happen. N.D. started running more plays, gaining more total yardage, and scoring more points on average than the opposition. Note that the defense, which didn't go through the turmoil the offense did, played pretty consistently and decently though the year. The drop in opposition points scored probably had more to do with the fact that the offense was finally able to move the ball some and stopped turning it over.
Had Notre Dame played the first 3 games like it did the last 8, it would've been a bowl team. The M.S.U. game was easily winnable. If the Irish had not dug themselves an 0-3 hole, perhaps either the B.C. or the Stanford game (perhaps both) would have been won. 7-4 would have been a probable mark for N.D. as it was the last 8 games; 8-3 would not have been out of the question.
In many ways, I have been thinking that Willingham's task mirrors Holtz's, and surely it does. Both are taking over 5-6 teams with bruised confidence. But perhaps in some ways Willingham's hill is not quite as steep as Holtz's. In truth, this N.D. team may not have been quite as bad as it appeared, and the team Holtz inherited had fallen apart at the end of the year, as Faust's teams were prone to do. But with this team, if even a modest passing attack could wring one more touchdown per game, then a 30 point per game offense comes into view. Nor does the schedule play the nasty tricks that it did last year and on Holtz in his first year. This year we play Maryland when it is the first game for both teams, Purdue when it is the second game for both teams and Michigan when it is the third game for both teams. Toe to toe, fair's fair. A lot of the parts are there; some decisive leadership can assemble them.