South Bend Spring: Football's in the Air

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Thoughts and observations from a Friday and Saturday spent around the Notre Dame football program:

Is there anything less revealing than a Pro Day, and why did half the teams in the NFL send a representative to South Bend to witness Jimmy Clausen's? Evaluating a quarterback on Pro Day versus a single game tape is like evaluating an air-brushed Chelsea Handler on the cover of Shape versus seeing her in the morning after a typical six Vodka/Stoli evening.

A cursory Top 10 list of the artificially enhanced conditions:

1) The quarterback is not wearing pads.
2) The quarterback does not have to read a defense's coverage.
3) There is no pass rush.
4) There is no snap from center.
5) There is no down-and-distance.
6) There are no hostile fans.
7) There is no clock management with which to concern oneself.
8) There is no wind, no rain, no intemperate climate.
9) There are no audibles that need be called.
10) Jim Harbaugh is not standing on the opposite sideline hurling expletives your way.

Clausen, as has been noted here and elsewhere, completed 57 of 59 passes (twice overthrowing sure-handed but slow-footed Robby Parris on deep balls) and threw an accurate ball. So what? Game tape of November's Navy contest will provide 10 times as much information on how to evaluate Clausen's quarterback potential.

Setting up a chef in a state-of-the-art kitchen and asking him to prepare one meal may inform you as to just what culinary heights he can reach. Placing that same chef in the kitchen of a restaurant that does 300 orders a night is the only true way to evaluate whether he can handle the job.


NFL teams regularly employ private investigators to vet potential draft picks, so as a service to PIs who have come to the Clausen case late, C.J.'s Pub no longer exists. At least not at the location it did in November.

C.J.'s, which long has boasted the best burger in South Bend (and justifiably so), closed down over the winter with plans to relocate. At the moment, however, C.J.'s, where only two years ago Ted Danson himself served as a celebrity bartender, has vanished. Not unlike Clausen's assailant.

After his workout on Friday someone asked Clausen if he keeps in touch with Charlie Weis. "He just called me last night," Clausen replied, "but I couldn't take it. I was out at dinner."

You have to love that visual. Clausen peeks down at his cellphone, sees that it is his former head coach (Does he have that number programmed as "Weis?" "Charlie?") and thinks, I'll get this one later. In fairness to Clausen, he did say that the two had spoken on Wednesday evening.

Clausen was also asked to clarify whether the damage to his big toe was a matter of torn ligaments or torn tendons. "Ligaments and tendons are pretty much the same thing," Clausen replied, which caused myself and Irish Eyes beat writer Tim O'Malley to lock eyes and smile. We had the same reaction that the two Delta House frat brothers once did when Blutarski foamed, "Was it over when the Germans attacked Pearl Harbor?!?"

In three of Weis' five seasons a Notre Dame wideout either tied or set a school record for the most receptions in a season (Jeff Samardzija with 77 in 2005 and 78 in '06; Golden Tate with 93 last year). In the two other years a record for receptions by a freshman was set (Duval Kamara with 32 in 2007 and Michael Floyd with 48 in '08).

No such records will be set in 2010, but not because the Irish will lack a passing attack. Rather, expect new coach Brian Kelly to be far more liberal with his use of receivers. I expect the first formation of the Kelly era to feature Michael Floyd, John Goodman and Theo Riddick on the field as eligible receivers along with tight end Kyle Rudolph. But I do not believe we will have long to wait before Deion Walker, Shaquelle Evans, Kamara, Roby Toma and even freshman Tai-ler Jones are on the field as well.

Brady Quinn had Samardzija. And Clausen had Tate. But I believe that Dayne Crist, at least this season, will be encouraged to spread the wealth and find the open man no matter what number is on his jersey.

On Friday evening, I grabbed a bite at an above-average South Bend eatery. A few tables away sat a prominent Fighting Irish lineman in the company of three young women. In my undergraduate days, that would have represented a perfect inverse of the male-to-female ratio.

Player whose sheer size caused me to do a double-take on Saturday: Braxston Cave. The junior (sophomore in terms of eligibility) from nearby Mishawaka must be getting home often to sample his mom's cooking. The Irish list Cave at 6-foot-3, 310 pounds. To me, objects that large normally have a "For Sale" sign on their front lawn. I will be surprised if he is not the starting center come September.


I like Brian Kelly. That does not mean I didn't like Charlie Weis. I did.

However, I love Kelly's energy, his capacity for speaking directly without alienating people, and his deft use of humor at the proper moments. When asked, for example, what he'd thought the first time he saw the spread offense in person, Kelly deadpanned, "I thought I was being credited for inventing it."

What else do I love? That Kelly has come to Notre Dame as an outsider and discovered, as has this 1980s era alumnus, that the school and its players are not representative of the Fighting Irish he grew up cheering for. In an article that appeared on ESPN.com last week, Mark Schlabach noted that Kelly put up a print of the painting "The Original Fighting Irish" (by former Notre Dame lacrosse player Revere La Noue) in his office.

"You don't see faces," Kelly told Schabach. "You see blue-collar. You see a bit of a swagger. You see toughness. Growing up as an Irish Catholic in Boston, that's what I remember Notre Dame being. That's been one of our goals every day -- to get that fight back in the Fighting Irish. It's good because that's who I am anyway."

It is not, however, what Notre Dame has been for some time. It has become, in the past 15 to 20 years, elitist. Kelly has spoken of a "sense of entitlement" and that comes directly from the top.

Take tuition, for example. Notre Dame was once one of the best bargains around in terms of an undergraduate education. Today, it is closer to Ivy League schools in terms of cost, which has affected the general demographic of the student body. While the school raised tuition just 3.8 percent for the coming academic year -- the smallest percentage increase since 1960 -- the cost of attending Notre Dame (tuition plus room and board) for the first time will exceed $50,000 annually. Cost of "The Shirt" is not included.

About "The Shirt." In autumn of 1988 two enterprising undergrads thought up, designed and then manufactured the legendary "Catholics vs. Convicts" T-shirt for the epic Miami game. That shirt made the pair a small fortune. It also embodies the sharp contrast between Notre Dame students of my era -- and the previous decades -- and those of today.

I can easily picture my classmates and I forking over money for an underground T-shirt that was irreverent and funny without being profane. I can't imagine any of us, though, hiking over to Hammes Bookstore to purchase a T-shirt that the administration has decreed to be the official student body uniform for home games. I understand that proceeds from "The Shirt" go to worthy causes. We all did the Urban Plunge, too. But we also placed a premium on innocent mischief to counter interminable hours of study and the inhospitable climate, both meteorological and social.

When I mention the North vs. South Quad snowball fight or the Dillon Hall fight song or even SYRs to students today, I might as well be asking how come they no longer say mass in Latin. You wonder how much longer the administration will permit the Keenan Revue to continue for fear that some litigator -- educated at Notre Dame -- will threaten to sue the school for condoning slander.

This is an assertion based on opinion as opposed to data, but it seems that Notre Dame has for years been killing off its undergraduate middle class. While opening doors to minorities, as it should, the institution has raised prices to a level where few except the sons and daughters of the wealthy (and minorities who are there on need-based scholarships) can afford it.

The school's average Joes -- students from the top 5 percent of their high school classes who were reared in middle-class Catholic families -- were once its backbone. The core of its identity. Students such as Jack Swarbrick, Charlie Weis, Daniel "Rudy" Ruettiger and Tim Bourret (a co-creator of Bookstore who is now an associate athletic director at Clemson). Alumni who, by the way, have told me, "I couldn't get into Notre Dame today."

In 1978, Rick Telander visited Notre Dame to do a feature on Bookstore Basketball, which was born in that decade, for Sports Illustrated. He described a scene in which one student struck golf balls across St. Joe's Lake as another stood across the lake with a baseball mitt, shagging the drives. Telander concluded that Notre Dame would have been a fun place to go to school for a sports-addled guy like himself.

That demographic is being sacrificed in order that Notre Dame may ascend the list of U.S. News & World Report's annual "Best Colleges" rankings. One consequence of this maneuvering, as Kelly may be discovering, is that Notre Dame is no longer the bastion of the plucky underdog. It is aspiring to become, and its administrators would probably be pleased to hear this, the Duke of the Midwest.

And while Duke is an excellent university, Notre Dame's identity was forged by doing more with less. Now that its students are so relatively pampered -- have you stepped inside The Gug? -- you wonder just how tough a football team they can be. Kelly, coming from a Cincinnati school whose facilities were lacking but whose players' determination never was, must find it somewhat ironic that his last job is much closer to the Notre Dame he envisioned than the present one happens to be.