Holtz Comes In From the Cold

The prevailing theory for a long time here has been that it will be a cold day in hell before Lou Holtz stops coaching the Notre Dame football team.

While South Bend certainly doesn’t qualify as hell, it should be noted that the forecast for today has temperatures in the mid-30s, with gray skies and a brisk wind off the St. Joseph River.

It would appear, barring some 11th-hour dramatics, that the little man with the lisp, who has marched the sidelines of the hallowed grounds of Notre Dame Stadium for the last 11 years, will walk right out of the Irish football picture.

That event is expected to take place at a news conference shortly after noon. In these parts, there are few things more monumental than the comings and goings of a football coach, so a sea of satellite dishes is expected to surround the WNDU-TV studios where the un-blessed event will take place.

That Holtz is leaving became a foregone conclusion in the early afternoon Monday, as various Notre Dame sources nodded the inevitable. This all began shortly after Notre Dame defeated Boston College Nov. 9, and Holtz started making references to how conditions would be for the “new coach.”

If anybody thought that was merely a slip of the tongue--as is frequently the case with this stand-up comic/history teacher who, over the years, has inadvertently regaled the media with references to games against the “University of Navy”--it was made much clearer last week with another quote.

“Lou Holtz needs Notre Dame, Notre Dame doesn’t need me,” Holtz said. “I think I’m a much better person for having been at Notre Dame.”

The past tense seemed clear there, as did the evasive quotes from Athletic Director Mike Wadsworth and Father William Beauchamp, Notre Dame’s executive vice president. Both, when given the chance to shoot this all down, said any decision on Holtz’s job would best come from Holtz.

And so it will, amid a media circus that might rival O.J. going to court.

Since the question of “what” seems pretty much a foregone conclusion, the questions of “why,” and of “who’s next,” will quickly move to center stage.

Since nobody at age 59, in apparently good health, walks away from the premier job in college football without an eye on a nice landing spot, especially a lucrative one, speculation has run deep that Holtz has decided to take the money and run. In this case, the most obvious money appears to belong to the Minnesota Vikings.

Holtz had a mildly successful run as coach of the Minnesota Gophers in 1985-86, so there is still some fondness there for him. Plus, the Vikings have been less-than-frequent Super Bowl contenders under current Coach Dennis Green.

But there are other theories. One is stress, the other health.

Dan Devine, who coached the Irish in the mid-1970s and won a national title in 1977, said Monday that Holtz called him last Wednesday at his home in Phoenix.

“I’m not sure why he called, although it was good hearing from him and we talked for nearly half an hour,” Devine said. “At first, I thought he was just responding to a note I had sent him a few months ago. I thought it had just sat on his desk, and he was just getting around to it.

“But when I got off the phone, I told my wife that he certainly sounded like a coach thinking about retiring. Looking back on it now, it was just not the type of call that a coach makes during a game week.”

The stress of being a Notre Dame coach is all too familiar to Devine, who came to the Fighting Irish in 1975 when Ara Parseghian stepped down, saying the pressure of the job was more than he could take.

There is also the theory here that the surgery done on Holtz last fall to relieve potentially paralyzing pressure on his spinal cord scared him enough to make him want to slow down.

The “who’s next” question has revolved around Northwestern Coach Gary Barnett, the current golden boy of college football, who danced a few numbers with UCLA last winter before going home with the one who brought him to the prom. That decision resulted in a reported 12-year, $6-million contract, of which Barnett has now fulfilled a game or so shy of one-twelfth. Currently, Barnett is doing some of the same steps he did with the Bruins, holding a news conference Monday to say he “loves Northwestern” and “I’m not looking to leave Northwestern.” The statements were sprinkled with lots of “at this point in time. . . .”

From the start of all this, Barnett has been the leading candidate. There is a history here. The last time Northwestern had a decent football team, in the early 1960s, Notre Dame did what had to be done. It hired Parseghian.

But there is also history that works the other way, as Devine would attest.

“Notre Dame has very strict approaches to things,” Devine said. “They offered me the job twice before I took it. The second time, they agreed that we couldn’t do this because I had a contract with Missouri, and Notre Dame doesn’t buy out contracts. That’s what would make me wonder about the Barnett situation.”

While all the talk about Barnett was going on, some other influential forces at Notre Dame were pushing for Terry Donahue. The former UCLA coach and winningest coach in the Pac-10, who stepped down at the end of last season to go into network broadcasting, was on the Irish short list of three in the middle of last week.

Sources say Donahue was asked to change his return itinerary from a broadcasting assignment to stop at Chicago and meet with Irish officials. Those sources also say Donahue, who likes the broadcasting job and is building a new home in Newport Beach, pondered the meeting and respectfully declined. That effectively took him out of the picture for the moment.

The third person on the short list is defensive coordinator Bob Davie. But Notre Dame seldom elevates assistants.

That leaves a second level of candidates, including former Irish assistant Barry Alvarez, who brought his Wisconsin Badgers to the Rose Bowl in 1993, but who has since seen his program decline in the area of wins and losses and players getting in trouble with the law. Former assistant or not, those sorts of things do not sit well with the men of the cloth at Notre Dame.