I’m still getting caught up with all of the press conferences and interveiws from Saturday’s game, but I just saw this tidbit from Weis’s presser Sunday morning.
Q. Yesterday after the game some of the players said specifically they had never seen you like you were before the game. Can you talk about that a little bit, what they meant by that?
COACH WEIS: I’ve been waiting for a long time to have that conversation before that game. And as you guys know last year after the Michigan game, as I sat there in Ann Arbor and answered all those questions, which was a long press conference, and then the next day we started going to work on trying to change things. We started then, we didn’t wait six weeks from then, we didn’t wait a year from then, we started then. And I remembered standing there on that sideline humiliated at how things were going, and I said, things are going to change.
I think that the message I wanted to say to them before we went out of the locker room is today is the day you’ve got to make a change. I’d like to sit there and take the kudos, but it wasn’t me, it was the players. But if you’re asking me if I was kind of wired up, yeah, I probably was a little wired up.
Weis has talked a lot about playing with more emotion this year so it is great to see that he is carrying that over to his coaching and pre-game demeanor. For a while this team has come out flat in big games and very “business” like. I keep thinking back to the 2006 Michigan game when Weis kept saying it was “just another game” and really played down the rivalry and emotion of the game and contrasting it with this past weekend and smiling.
Seeing Weis hobbling on the sidelines on cruches in the pouring rain in the second half showed how much this one meant to Weis so it shouldn’t be too surprising that Weis was fired up before the game. Considering that one of Weis’s biggest criticism is that he has taken too much of the NFL style approach on the college level though it is somewhat surprising.
A lot of what Charlie is doing this year is showing that he is changing and after last season, that it is very, very good news.
That’s all my updates for tonight, I’ll post the weekly UHND Opponent Poll tomorrow.
I must say, seeing him in crutches made me feel a little…ok only just a little…ready to go through a wall for the man. I know JoePa is much older, but the same kind of thing happened to him a while ago, and he had to go up to the booth to call the rest of the game. The shot of Weis completely focused on the game, with the rain pouring down his face and his beaten body…It was good to see.