A Quick Note on Bob Davie

I like Bob Davie the announcer. I think he's pretty good in the booth and offers a lot more insight than most of the pieces of furniture that ESPN and ABC give mics to during football season. As time passed my animosity toward him and his tenure in South Bend had waned...but each of the last two Notre Dame coaching searches has reminded me why I couldn't stand him and was thrilled he got canned.

Bob Davie was a good football coach. He led us to arguably the two best years since Lou left and always had a very good and well-coached defense. In '98 we were one freak injury to Jarious Jackson away from going 10-1. Two years later he took us to the Fiesta Bowl and frankly we were thisclose to being undefeated (our first loss was to #1 Nebraska in overtime, where our QB played the entire game with a broken wrist after a late hit in the first quarter...our second loss was on a 69 yard TD late in the fourth against MSU where we had a tight end--In Godsey We Trust--starting for us at quarterback).

That being said, he was the worst clock manager in the history of athletics--his ineptitude transcended college football. It was almost as if he never figured out that teams get three timeouts PER HALF, not PER QUARTER. The other thing was every year without fail we had one game where we had our doors blown off before we even knew what hit us (in '98: down 42-3 at halftime to Michigan State, in '00: completely curb-stomped by Oregon State 41-9 in the Fiesta Bowl).

But the thing that made my blood boil most was what he did off the field: complain. If he spent half the time gameplanning, studying Sun Tzu's second book (The Art of Timeouts), and figuring out how to win that he did whining and offering as excuses as to why he COULDN'T win he may still be our coach. He's someone who never quite understood Notre Dame and never embraced the tradition, history, and fanfare.

In 2004 he got on ESPN and proclaimed he advised Urban Meyer against taking the Notre Dame job because he didn't think it was a place someone could succeed. Now he's at it again going on College Football Live suggesting that Notre Dame needs to change things around to be like other schools in order to compete. He pointed to the fact that the schedule was too hard to make a run at a title, that ND couldn't recruit every player in the country because some didn't qualify academically (note: the average SAT's of Bob's recruiting class was around 900), that players had to *GASP* live in dorms with other normal students, and finally (God forbid) the coach was required to do things outside of football like attend and speak at the pep rally Friday night and go to a Saturday luncheon.

You'll never get it Bob. That's why every Notre Dame fan wants to forget you ever coached under the Dome and why no other college football program cast its lot with you. You may know your stuff (and love to lick your hand repeatedly while on the sideline), but you spend too much time offering up excuses for your failures instead of overcoming them.

There's no crying in football Bob (that goes for you too, Tim Tebow). That's why in the end you were made for the booth, not the sidelines.