Notre Dame Fires Coach Weis: Crisis of Faith to Blame? - Yahoo! News

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Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick talks with the media about the firing of coach Charlie Weis …

College football may seem like a religion to Americans, but to many American Catholics, the University of Notre Dame football team is the incarnation of their faith in sport. Yet apart from the battle for the college football national championship, the biggest news this season has been the continued decline of Notre Dame.

After another disappointing season, the University of Notre Dame has lost another football coach. Charlie Weis tried to make the Fighting Irish, once the New York Yankees of college sports, important again. He tried to recapture Notre Dame's fabled past. He couldn't do it. On Monday afternoon, Weis, head football coach at Notre Dame, was fired.

Notre Dame is 6-6 this season, and Weis, 54, didn't do much better in his previous four seasons as coach. While the Fighting Irish have won 11 national championships in their storied history, the team has not won one for 21 years. And while some may point to the shortcomings of its coach or players, a more fundamental reason may lie in a crisis of the Catholic faith.
In Notre Dame's glory days, Catholic secondary schools were prime recruiting centers. Priests and nuns would ask for prayers for "the boys" on Saturdays and would encourage their best athletes to attend Notre Dame. But many forces, including abuse by priests, have damaged American Catholicism and crippled the parochial school system. Nearly 1 in 5 Catholic schools in the U.S. has closed its doors this decade. Combine that with a more secular society, a more competitive college-recruiting environment and Notre Dame's tough admissions requirements, and it has become more and more difficult for the school to field a team capable of competing for a national championship.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091201/us_time/08599194356000

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20091201/us_time/08599194356000