FanHouse Jimmyclausen

FanHouse writer John Walters is living in South Bend, Ind., during one of the most pivotal seasons in Notre Dame history. Check back daily for his dispatches on the Irish.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- At 8-4 or 7-5, Notre Dame is bowl-eligible ("Hellllllo, Jacksonville!"). At 6-6, the Fighting Irish are bowl-execrable. The Irish could accept a bowl bid with that record, but would a Notre Dame reeling from four straight defeats and a likely coaching change actually do that?

The feeling here is no.

So, while much of the inquiries to players this week have concerned the seniors' final game at Notre Dame Stadium or the status of their coach, the game with Connecticut is for all intents Notre Dame's bowl-eligible bowl. Win and you'll be wearing pads in December. Lose and you limp in to Palo Alto to face the hottest team in America.
And if the Irish do go bowling, the questions become even more intriguing.

Will Charlie Weis still be the head coach?

I'm not sure who's more hopelessly out of place: Charlie Weis on the Notre Dame sideline or Jon Gruden in the "Monday Night Football'' broadcast booth. But two wrongs easily can be righted in one spectacular swoop. The Domers need to swallow hard again, reach down for that big wallet, send away Weis with his $18 million buyout and hire Gruden as their next coach.

Because Navy just sank the USS Charlie.

FanHouse writer John Walters is living in South Bend, Ind., during one of the most pivotal seasons in Notre Dame history. Check back daily for his dispatches on the Irish.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- When it comes to team bonding, victory is the greatest adhesive. These Irish are a tight bunch, and Charlie Weis conceded on Tuesday that "going through all those tight games at the end of the game has bonded the team even more."

The Irish have won five of their past six, and that one loss came down to one play. Or four. Or a mismanaged final 35 seconds (cue Glenn Frey's "Get Over It"). Whatever. The 6-2 record and the Alcoa "Fantastic Finishes" have certainly done more to unite this team than a trust-fall exercise. However, there is something else at work here: character at the top of the roster.

Brace yourselves, Irish fans: The quarterback, he ain't coming back.

The Double D was in the midst of a 17-hour journey between South Bend and Eugene on Thursday (perhaps I just should have driven?), so it missed Charlie Weis' post-practice presser with reporters.

One of the subjects Weis broached was what has become everyone's favorite parlor game around the Gug: Will Jimmy Clausen return for a senior season? "We're not even going to address the subject until the first week in December," my man Brian Hamilton reports Weis saying on chicagobreakingsports.com. "We've already addressed the fact that we're not going to address it. So we're just worrying about the next five games, starting with Washington State. First of all, let's see how we play. But we'll revisit it then."

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- For the past four seasons I have been attending the Notre Dame captains' press conferences inside the spacious and cozy confines of the Gug's auditorium. And for the past four years these sessions have provided me with vivid, uncomfortable flashbacks of lecture hall profs whose monotonous delivery would lead me to daydream about whether they'd be serving chicken patty sammiches for lunch in the South Dining Hall.

Dig it: Most of the Irish captains have been extremely bright and charismatic guys. Men such as Brady Quinn, Tom Zbikowski and Maurice Crum come to mind. The problem is always that they seem to be coached the way a defendant is before taking the stand. In fact, the only humorous moment that comes to mind from the past few years happened in 2006. I rose from my seat to grab the microphone from a fellow reporter to ask Zibby a question. As I began to ask the question while trying to sit down, I missed the edge of the theater chair and stumbled to the floor.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten previews the weekend's action, or lack thereof.

There are weeks when many of us would trade lives with Jim Tressel. This is not one of those weeks.

Not only did his Buckeyes fail to finish USC when they had the Trojans on the ropes, Tressel also saw "Tresselball" ripped apart by Chris Brown of Smart Football, faced a fan base who want him fired three days ago, had to lash back at some of those same fans, discovered that one of USC's touchdowns may not have happened, and now he has to face a Toledo team that just mashed Colorado into goo.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons why you wouldn't want to be Jim Tressel this week, but "because he's on the hot seat" isn't one of them.

Every Thursday, Pickin' On the Big Ten previews the weekend's action, even when the truth is ugly.

It was a bad week for vowels.

The seven Big Ten schools whose names start with consonants played anywhere from OK to brilliantly this past weekend. The four that start with vowels -- Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Ohio State -- all dropped a pantload on the field.

Illinois gets a partial pass because Missouri has been on a nice run lately. Ohio State played a Navy team that usually goes bowling. Indiana struggled with a Division I-AA FCS school, but they're Indiana; you kind of expect these things from them after a while.

That leaves one school. Iowa. And if I was an Iowa fan ... wait. I am an Iowa fan. Make the jump and see what has me feeling punchy. I promise I'll get around to the games eventually.

Christmas decorations begin in late August, and now the ClayNation Hypesman Watch (CHW) is here in the first week of May. It's part of a new term, I just coined: Heisman Creep. (And it has nothing to do with Maurice Clarett). We're going to try something radical here, every other week or so we'll drop in and give you a top 10 list for Heisman candidates. Even though most of them are finishing their spring finals right about now. The goal is to ridicule the Heisman obsession, keep us entertained, and write about the Heisman in a way no one else is.

And, plainly, it's never too early to start debating the most over-hyped award this side of a kindergarten valedictorian.

And it ain't pretty. Perhaps sensing an opening to take shots at the Notre Dame coach after the new athletic director had to issue something resembling a vote of confidence this week and Jason Whitlock took to calling him college football's "Pear Bryant", the Tribune fired off several more volleys at the ego of the Irish coach.

The Tribune's college football writer Teddy Greenstein delivers a virtual treasure trove of anecdotes and quotes hammering at Weis' seemingly limitless ego. An appetizer:

When [Jeannette PA football coach Ray] Reitz told Weis that [recruit Terrelle] Pryor might attend a USC quarterbacks camp, he remembers Weis replying: "Why send him there? If he's with me for one day he'll be good, two days he'll be great and three days he'll be incredible."

Later, unprompted, Weis asked the Jeannette coaches if they wanted to take a picture of his Super Bowl ring.

What, no request to kiss the ring as well? Ask Pitt what it thinks about Jimmy Clausen after two years with Weis.

Leading up to the game with North Carolina, Notre Dame fans were voicing their displeasure that their team was 4-1 and unranked. This was the first time the Irish have been4-1 and unranked. Well, North Carolina made that point moot today with a 29-24 victory. And they had a lot of help from Notre Dame not being able to hold on to the ball. Notre Dame turned the ball over five times, while the Tar Heels had zero turnovers.

Irish quarterback, Jimmy Clausen had a strong day passing the ball for 384 yards and two touchdowns. But one of his two interceptions was taken back for a touchdown. That play, at the start of the third quarter tuned the momentum of the game. From then on out, North Carolina looked and played like the better team, outscoring Notre Dame 20-7 in the second half.

On the next to last play of the game, Clausen hit Michael Floyd for 24 yards at the North Carolina 19. Floyd fumbled the ball on the play and North Carolina recovered. With the crowd going wild and both teams walking on to the field to shake hands, the play was reviewed for what seemed like 10 minutes before a ruling that the play on the field stood. It was a weird scene waiting for the results, and kept the final outcome in question with Notre Dame so close. But the luck of the Irish ran out today, and Notre Dame fans can go back to worrying about things other than their team being ranked.

North Carolina, on the other hand is right in the mix for a shot at the ACC title game. With Virginia, NC State, Duke, and Maryland still on the schedule, things are certainly looking up. Also, with backup turned starter Cameron Sexton coming on strong at quarterback and not making mistakes while moving the team, questions about the offense might be put to rest.