Tuesdays with Charlie: Michigan Edition

As you may well already know, Tuesday is my favorite week day for Notre Dame football. Today’s press conference was another wonderful dose of CW, and it’s very clear that he didn’t spend all his time this offseason getting ready for the Pistol.

Here are some tidbits from Tuesday’s with Charlie.

* Introduction word count: 1,117 (Although the transcriber definitely cheated Charlie out of at least 50 words after watching the tape.) This wasn’t vintage Charlie, but he did let us know that he noticed that Michigan has two different fullbacks that do different things, and that they can line up about 14 different guys as the slot receiver. Also interesting, Stevie Brown plays the “spinner” position, which was a lot like what Harrison Smith did for the Irish last year.

* As we mentioned yesterday, James Aldridge is out. It took exactly one question to get that established, so congrats to the guys at the press conference for being on top of things.

* Also interesting was the early mention of Greg Robinson, and his familiarity with the Irish. It felt like one of those conversations where you bring up to one of your buddies his super hot ex-girlfriend, and he has to tell us that she’s doing really well, actually dating a doctor, and I think they may be getting married. No one actually dared mutter the word Syracuse, but to Weis’ credit he did say it twice in his remarks.

* The arrow is point up, part 3. Rough estimate, but this is the third time that CW has said the arrow is pointing up this year. The three pointers are Jimmy Clausen, Mister Michael Floyd, and Manti Te’o. I wonder what I’d have to do to get Weis to say the arrow was pointing up for me? 10,000 word live-blog? Spell Boubacar Cissoko correctly on the first try? (4th try.)

* Weis had “nice” things to say about Tate Forcier. (We’ll get to this later today...) Although he did hint at something I think a lot of us want to say.

“Yeah, he’s been here, we visited him, we know him and his whole family, we know the whole ball of wax. It was interesting I haven’t thought about him for a while, but it was interesting he went to four high schools in four years, I think. I’d have to go back and look at that, but I think it’s four high schools in four years so it was tough to keep track of him a little bit, to tell you the truth.”

I think that might be code for: Spoiled rotten kid we wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot poll.

* Comparing Armando Allen’s output to Darius Walker’s:

“I think Armando could do that now if you gave him every rep, but the difference is the drop off from the first guy to the second guy when I first got here was significant. The drop off in the first running back to the second running back led to you want to go keep the first running back on the field all the time.

“Now we got extra guys. When you see the next guy come in, Armando goes out and Jonas goes in, you don’t see a big drop off in performance, and that’s the difference. If you have one guy and you keep on feeding him, you better get production out of him or else you’re going to have a long, hard day.”

* Weis made mention of Corwin Brown as his secret weapon to get his players especially motivated for the heated rivalry.

“I have Corwin here, so I have a guy who literally knows both sides of the story. That’s one advantage of having a proud Michigan alum as your associate head coach at Notre Dame.”

* Of course, someone mentioned Charlie’s favorite Michigan graduate, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. Weis would only say that he’s traded texts with Brady, and that he’d gotten in trouble once before for disclosing that they had something riding on the game.