Ready To Roll

Charlie Weis probably hasn’t been this excited since…well, the second half of last December. You could probably have guessed why, but the coach was happy to state the obvious…

“I love game weeks,” Weis said Tuesday afternoon. “Probably my least-favorite week of the entire year is last week, because you’re going through everything like it’s a game, but there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. There’s no game.

“Now it’s game week, so the energy level in practice, as high as it was last week, will go up twice as much this week, because now they know come Saturday at 3:42 or 3:43, we’ll be doing it for real.”

To ensure that his team is in the right frame of mind, Weis will have the No. 1 offense and defense battle at full speed – after the media viewing period ends, of course.

“As soon as we get rid of a certain group of people, we’ll be having a full-speed, offense-versus-defense practice to kind of get everyone’s attention,” he said. “That’ll kind of be a wake-up call to get everyone going.”

With an explosive opponent like Nevada coming in, Weis doesn’t think he’ll have any problem getting the players’ undivided attention.

“Sometimes when you’re watching a team, you don’t have enough evidence on tape,” he stated, “and it’s a tough sell, where you’re getting up in front of your team and you’re trying to say how tough a game it’s going to be. But there’s plenty of evidence on tape with this team right here.”

A good chunk of that evidence was likely in the form of junior quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who was the Western Athletic Conference’s offensive player of the year last fall after becoming the fifth player in FBS (Division I-A) history to pass for 2,000 yards and rush for 1,000 in the same season. Kaepernick finished with 2,849 yards and 22 touchdowns through the air in 2008, while also rushing for 1,130 yards and 17 scores.

Some of the Irish defensive players even started drawing parallels with former Texas star Vince Young when asked about Kaepernick last week.

“Looking at the things that Texas was asking Vince Young to do, I think are a lot of the things that they ask Kaepernick to do, but from a different formation,” Weis noted. “The unique part in Nevada’s offense is that they don’t lose their downhill plays, their straight downhill plays, because although the quarterback’s in a shotgun, the back’s behind the quarterback.”

Those backs – Vai Taua (1,521 yards rushing in 2008) and Luke Lippincott (almost 2,000 career yards before missing last season with an injury) make Kaepernick even more of a thread, because you can’t just key on one player out of the backfield.

Basically, it’s as if Navy also had an aerial attack, in a way.

“Their running backs are good,” Weis stated. “If you’re selling out to stop (Taua and Lippincott), before you know it, (Kaepernick) is on the edge. So that’s the vulnerability you have with a scheme like this. It’s not just (Kaepernick). He is a darn good player, but I think that in Coach Ault’s scheme, if you don’t stop the run first, don’t stop the inside run, you have a problem. If you worry about just Kaepernick, they’re going to be gashing you inside. So before you even get to the passing game, you’ve got two major concerns.”

On the other side of the ball, Nevada figures to have its share of trouble with Notre Dame’s passing game, leading some to assume that the Irish will simply abandon the run altogether as it did in games such as the Brigham Young shellacking in 2005.

Weis wouldn’t really tip his hand either way, for obvious reasons.

“Score however you can,” the coach stated. “If they go in the game and they stop the run and we need to throw, we’ll throw. But what we’d like to do, if you’re asking me the game plan right now and tell Coach Ault what we want to do, we’d like to throw it half the time and we’d like to run it half the time. That’s what we’d like to do, but I don’t know how it’s going to play out.”

“It’s the first game – you’ve got to be ready for just about everything.”

Striving For Perfection
By playing nearly a perfect game against Hawaii, Jimmy Clausen showed that his potential is indeed limitless. Weis was asked whether the Irish quarterback hopes to replicate that success against Nevada and beyond.

“Why don’t you ask Mark Buehrle if he liked pitching a perfect game,” the coach replied. “When you’re 22 for 26 with four dropped balls, you can’t play any better than that. But the best thing from a coach’s perspective…that’s what you’ve got to shoot for on a week-in, week-out basis.”

Clearly, Clausen can’t be expected to put up such numbers every week, but it’s definitely the goal – and it’s very much a realistic one, given the improvements that have been made since that December outing.

“I think that I’m most pleased with his progress from the end of last season to right now,” Weis said. “The first year was kind of a get-through-the-year year. The second year, he grew into more understanding of what a college quarterback is, and I think that where he went from, let’s say the USC game last year – which is when we decided we were really going to start the next year – from that time until right now, I think he’s put himself in a position to be really, really good.

“I’m expecting him to be really, really good…Things are in place for the arrow to be pointing up in a lot of different directions.”

Looking Sharp
Though he’s unlikely to see action against the Wolf Pack on Saturday, senior quarterback Evan Sharpley has been an invaluable part of the game preparation.

His job, both last week and this week, is mimicking Kaepernick in practice.

“He’s the runaway winner for the scout team player of the week,” Weis said of Sharpley. “Put it like this – we haven’t even started this week’s practice, and I already will tell you he’ll be the scout team player of the week. Because if last week was any indication…he’s given (the defense) a lot of headaches.”

A Billboard Hit?
The coach was asked about the anonymous message displayed on a billboard across the street from campus – “Best wishes to Charlie Weis in the fifth year of his college coaching internship.” (That billboard has since been attributed to former player Tom Reynolds, a seldom-used reserve linebacker in the late 1960s under Ara Parseghian.)

“Everything was great until the last word, so tell them thanks a lot for wishing me best wishes,” Weis said with a laugh. “I heard about it, I haven’t seen it, and we’ll just leave it at that. But it sounded pretty good – just take that last word out and we’re all set.”

Injury Report
After experiencing all sorts of success calling plays from the press box in the Hawaii Bowl, Weis surprised some when he subsequently announced that he planned to be back on the sideline for the 2009 season – especially given the state of his knees after the injury sustained during the Michigan game last year.

The coach again addressed the issue (at least for now) on Tuesday.

“Right now, I can’t answer that question 10 games from now, but I can tell you right now, it’s not an issue. My knees feel as good as they’ve felt since the hit. They feel as good as they can possibly feel. I was in that tub again this morning, going in and putting my couple of miles in there. They feel as good as they’re going to feel until I get the other one done.”

If I Were A Rich Man…
Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez has come under fire in recent days because of allegations that the Wolverines routinely flout NCAA regulations regarding the number of allowable practice hours during a week.

Weis wouldn’t get into Michigan’s issues or anyone else’s, but insisted that staying within the rules is not a problem for the Notre Dame staff.

“It’s actually pretty easy here because of our relationship with compliance,” Weis said. “Our kids don’t get out of school until 2 o’clock, so we don’t see them in the building until 2:15…Between 2:15 and 6:45, we have four hours of meeting and a half-hour to get dressed, because from there they’ve got to go eat dinner and then go to study hall. So there isn’t a lot of time here. It’s a tight clock. Time management here is tough enough as it is for these guys.”

“I don’t know what anyone else does. I just know what we do.”