Kansas inexplicably hires Charlie Weis

Hahahahahahaha:

LAWRENCE, Kan. -- Former Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis has been hired at Kansas. Weis will be introduced during a news conference Friday.

The jokes: They're so easy.

On a non-weight-related note, this makes no sense at all. I realize that Charlie Weis is a "name" hire and the pool of quality candidates wasn't overflowing and yadda yadda yadda, but ... I mean ... the guy just hasn't been successful as a college coach since Ty Willingham's upperclassmen stopped taking him to BCS games. The 20-5 start at Notre Dame was achieved without beating a single team that finished the season ranked, which is kind of weird and remarkable, and he went 16-21 after Brady Quinn left and he actually had to, like, develop some of his ridiculous recruiting classes.

That's pretty much Charlie Weis in a nutshell (not that he would fit lol zing!): excellent recruiter, allegedly good strategist, awful talent developer. There's no other way to explain going well under .500 over a three-year post-transition period with recruiting classes that ranked eighth, eighth, second and 21st (according to Rivals) in the country. And unlike Turner Gill, Weis actually got to see his first class through; he got a full five years and could never get his own hypothetically talented guys to even seven regular-season wins, which really shouldn't be that difficult with a supposed "schematic advantage" over everybody.

Speaking of which, Florida was pretty blah this year with Weis as O-coordinator: 102nd (!) in total offense, 72nd in scoring offense, 87th in passing offense, 75th in rushing offense. After a cupcake-tastic four-game start, Florida didn't put up more than 26 points on any FBS team the rest of the year and scored a combined 66 points in its six losses. For you journalism majors, that's 11 points a game. John Brantley missed all or part of three of those games, but still: gack. There is no way that offense should be finishing 102nd nationally.

Just ask, like, anybody who watched Florida this year. You know that means EDSBS:

YOU IDIOTS THANK YOU. Gator fans, let's just hug. That is my hand on your ass. Don't fight it. Don't make it weird.

Lol exactly. Here's SI's Holly Anderson:

Congratulations to the Florida Gators on a great hire (for Florida) by Kansas!

Ouch. And doing that with elite recruits at two places with gobs of money/support/tradition somehow got him a job at a place with absolutely none of those things. In short, I see no way this doesn't work.

I went over all this stuff when Turner Gill got canned, but Kansas football has been bad for basically its entire modern existence outside the end of the Glen Mason era in the late '80s and the middle of the Mark Mangino era. Turner Gill probably just isn't a great coach but managed to turn Buffalo (!) into something respectable before cratering Kansas, which had been sliding from "unusually good" to "decent" and just kept sliding. Winning seven games a year is doable with a good coach -- especially in the hypothetically weakened Big 12 -- but the "good coach" part is definitely a requirement. The 2013 version of Jimmy Clausen/Brady Quinn won't be going to Kansas; the only way to win is through serious player development, and that's the one thing I'm pretty certain Charlie Weis isn't good at.

There's also this:

It was little secret that Weis wasn't fond of Kansas City during his time with the Chiefs, and he moved on to the Gators in part so that he could be near his son, who is also on the football staff. He bought a horse farm in nearby Ocala and has several health issues that include possibly needing hip surgery after the season that could make it difficult to jump right into recruiting.

Still, the opportunity to rebuild the Jayhawks appears to be enough of a challenge.

Errr yeah. Any head coaching job would have been "enough of a challenge" for a guy with an ego the size of his waistband who probably didn't want to go down forever as the blob who signed a bazillion-year contract at Notre Dame and got fired three years later. What it was that made spectacularly named athletic director Sheahon Zenger think Weis was deserving of that challenge is the part I can't figure out.

Still, I'll be rooting for the guy to go 12-1 at least once. There is no way the Weis-at-Kansas thing can end without the picture-frame complement to this beauty:

That is all.