Zook took a DOA program and has turned it around. They had never won more than 3 games a year from 2001-2004.

Weis is going the opposite direction and losing to programs with non-scholarship athletes who should be playing DII ball.
Kids are regressing on his watch. I live in Chicago and watch alot of their games.
It is ALL on Weis. He does not know how to turn HS kids in to college players.

It was no surprise when Mack refused to try to make a home&home work.

I seriously doubt this happened.  Mack has no intention of being the HC past 2010. He would have no truck with ND in 2013.
Plus they want those matchups on nuetral sites, something I doubt Texas would give in to. It would mean television rights to NBC.

Good recruits don't get that bad for no reason. They aren't being coached on the fundamentals, and they are getting the spirit knocked out of them. It's not enough to clear out the "deadwood," you actually have to put some effort into getting the new players to grow.

Put it this way: absent anything else, if someone told you a given team was heavy on underclassmen and went 1 - 9 this year and couldn't execute on the field, would your first solution be "add more players who don't know what they're doing yet"?

I used to teach a bit in grad school and the most satisfaction I got was in finding a way to get through to the students who weren't grasping it the first time. I didn't call them out for being dumb or slow, I figured that they just needed me to find another way to say it. I did go after the ones who weren't trying, but in private.

I watched a little of the ND - Air Force game on Saturday and it wasn't that the ND players weren't trying. The best you could say about Weis' comments was that perhaps he was being inarticulate rather than throwing the kids under the bus.

As someone else noted in this thread, Ty Willingham is much better at clearly throwing his players under the bus, not that this is a trait worth emulating.