Notre Dame’s 27-22 loss last night to Pittsburgh likely represented the final nail in Charlie Weis’ coffin.  With an overall record of 35-25 as head coach, he’s basically on par with the limited success achieved by the likes of Bob Davie and Tyrone Willingham.  The Irish performance against the Panthers pretty much summed up the Charlie Weis era – another listless performance punctuated by myriad miscues, blown chances, phantom tackling and poor officiating.  On that last note, the Irish were most certainly screwed by those Big East officials.  Not only were the penalty calls massively skewed towards the Irish but the officials totally blew two replay calls that came at crucial moments in the game.  There was no way in hell that Jimmy Clausen fumbled that ball there at the end – doesn’t the fact that the ball went forward ten yards indicate forward motion? – and the stripping of an Irish timeout on that review added insult to injury.  In all seriousness, this may have been the worst-officiated game I’ve ever seen.  How these guys can get things so wrong while having the benefit of instant replay boggles my mind.

At the end of the day, though, the Irish deserved to lose that game.  And, unfortunately, Charlie Weis deserves to lose his job.  This is a bittersweet development for me, as I believe that Charlie has done a wonderful job rebuilding the program after the Willingham experiment in talent destruction.  I also believe that Charlie is a good guy who has run a clean program.  However, he’s just not getting it done on Saturdays.  So we now get to turn our attention to ND’s search for his replacement, which one can only hope is handled with more professionalism and efficiency than was witnessed with the last coaching search.