The Dry Season 2: A TQM Coach
UHND.com - Rock Kanutski
July 12, 2001

You heard me call this the Dry Season, the time of no news and speculation, the time when the ND faithful, like Moses and his crew, know that Canaan won't show up for a good long while. The season of mental reruns. The empty time, when we wonder and wait.

So let's begin our desert wonderings, our summer speculations, with Mr. Davie. This is the first of two articles on the subject.

Let's start by calling it what it is—Bob Davie has many points in his favor.

First, he's smart.

Second, he's a good man who builds great team loyalty and cohesion.

Third, he's a constant problem-solver.

And finally, as the women around me endlessly (it seems) point out, he's quite good looking. (Well, we'll just let that one go. If you're female, you're on your own here.)

There's no question Bob Davie is a smart man. Even his detractor's can't say otherwise. (Please—let's hold those yes-but's for later. When it's time, I'll add a few of my own.)

His intelligence serves him well in two ways. First, narrowly, tactically; he has a good analytical mind with an very good grasp of the college defensive game. He can do the X's and O's, at least on the defensive side. And he's learning the offense as we speak. (More on this below.)

Second, broadly, strategically; he seems to know what it takes for a coach like him, a person like him, to survive and succeed at a school like Notre Dame. And what he hadn't figured out already by Day One, he learns as he goes.

Let's not underestimate how much he knew coming in. He knew he was taking on the premier head-coaching job in without head-coaching experience. He also knew he was inheriting a team with problems. (We can disagree about what those problems were, but let's face it, the Lee Becton team, which is also the Kim Dunbar team by the way, is not the Tony Rice or Jerome Bettis team by a good long stretch.)

You can call him Excuses Bob or Indirect Davie (he does sometimes call a trowel a spade and a river a ditch), but those are communication habits—bad ones, yes, but still just talking problems. Those habits got him in trouble in the Joe Moore case, as Tim Prister and others point out, and they get him in trouble with the ND faithful. But that's just the talk.

When it comes to the walk, he has the smarts to analyze correctly what it takes for his kind of person, working with his tools, from his starting point, to succeed. He knows he needs to:

Be methodical in making improvement (a skill he has in, er, spades)
Keep his team with him (remember, he watched Holtz lose his team and saw what that cost)
Stay in tune with the cultural requirements of the university (no more Kim Dunbar, not now, not ever)

This is not the analysis, the approach, of a dumb person. This approach maximizes his chance of success. It draws on his particular strengths while buying the most extra time he can wrap his arms around for the OJT he knows he desperately needs.

This is smart. It's also clever.

Bob Davie is also a good man. (Yes, that's a unequivocal statement.) Despite his own tendency to equivocation, to soften hard talk (a tendency often preceded by declarations like "let's call it what it is" or "he'll be the first to tell you"), Bob Davie is the kind of decent man who doesn't lie to recruits, chase bad apples, or mistreat other humans.

He even feels like a man of integrity. It's clear he considers the welfare of his team above his own. In that sense, he may lack the killer instinct; but who wants that, if it comes with a Dennis Erickson wrapped around it?

And this decency has a big upside. Because he treats his team well, he has their loyalty, their remarkable unity, and their constant willingness to over-achieve.

And lest we forget, this kind of goodness is also quite the virtue to have, if you work at an institution that tries to be spiritual, as opposed to merely religious. It's nicely designed to keep the pink-slip wolf from the head coach's door. (I did mention he's smart, right?)

But perhaps his greatest virtue of all is that he seems the type to constantly, relentlessly make improvement. Like they said while singing that now-gone corporate mantra, TQM (that's Total Quality Management for those who've forgotten), Bob Davie believes in always changing for the better.

Before you think that's an obvious thing to do, search your memories for that opposite mantra—you've probably sung that one too. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." There are a ton of people dancing to that. But I don't think Davie would be one of them, even if he got himself one of those magic NC seasons. (Just a thought; wasn't there a former ND coach who complained he forgot that lesson, the one that says you always need to be growing? One of the heros of the story, as I recall.)

Davie never rests, and his team is the beneficiary. Let's chart his changes.

Before he even begins, he fires Joe Moore. That's gutsy. But as good an O-line coach as Moore is, I think Tim Prister is right—that Moore's discontented attitude would have acted like a cancer and torn the team apart.

As a fix, Davie brings in Jim Coletto, another line coach, and by that move also solves another problem, since Davie, a defensive coach from birth, needs an offensive coordinator.

Does the fix take? Yes and no. The team rushes pretty well, but Coletto brings his own trouble to the table. Still, given the situation with Moore, I think the crew was clearly better off with Coletto. Don't believe me? Imagine how broken that bunch would have been with Moore, a loyalty man himself, undercutting Davie to his personally loyal O-line veterans every day of his tenure.

We all know the story; Coletto is a fix that needed fixing. So what does Davie do? Still working the offense side, he makes another change, fires Coletto, and hires a man who by current accounts is a OC wunderkind—Kevin Rogers—and Dave Borberly is now coaching the O-line. Problem solved, maybe.

Next year, as Kevin Rogers settles in, we get that horrid collapse, that descent into hell at the end of the 1999 season. Yes, the O-line was still a "work in progress", but maybe the answers were in place, since the guys in front of Jarious were young and youth itself can be a problem.

So he lets the offense percolate. The defense, on the other hand, hadn't really worked that well in a good while.

Time for another big change. Davie takes the DC reins from Greg Mattison without ruffling one feather and starts turning the defense into the attack machine he needs to win the national championship.

And in the bargain, he gets a better defensive line, since Mattison can clearly coach the line. Would Ryan Roberts have developed without Mattison beside him? I wasn't there (except in spirit, of course), but I truly doubt it.

And this time the fix takes. My prediction? Look for the defense to stay fixed. From here on out, Davie's defenses will more and more resemble the D's of Parsegian's day, when we moaned our opponents' scoring more than their winning. I think we're at least two years away (obviously), but watch out.

That's Prediction One—the Rock stands on it.

And the most recent improvement—special teams. This one is the signature for the virtue I'm touting. Davie took himself to school, him and his coaches, and learned (I think I mentioned he was smart). The outcome was the best special teams, and special teams effort, in memory, certainly in mine.

We'll see if this one takes, but I'm betting it will. That's Prediction Two, if you're counting.

So where does this leave us in the constant improvement department? Let's see—defense on track, special teams earning their pay (and then some). Looks like we're back where we started, in year one, with Joe Moore and the O-line.

Though no one inside is saying it, the O-line has to be a concern. It's just too obviously a problem, and Davie's too smart not to notice.

Don't you get the idea that ND could have the best O-line talent in the world, and somehow the job still wouldn't get done?

So here's Prediction Three—Davie will take on the offensive line the way he did the special teams. Losing Moore (in the active, not the passive sense) solved a problem and caused a problem. Gaining Coletto did the same. Acquiring Kevin Rogers, solved the OC problem (maybe), but it didn't fix the line problem.

I don't think Dave Borberly is the answer to the line, and it's likely his boss doesn't either. But the talent's there, including one flat-out star—Jeff Faine. Will Davie waste the Faine years? Hardly.

We've already seen the first of the O-line fixes—a small one, but it shows Davie's mind is already on the problem. The blocking schemes have been tweaked, thanks to the lessons taught us by the Frito-Lay Woodchucks (sorry, the OSU Beavers).

I don't think it will stop there. We'll soon see how that change works; in the meantime, I think Davie takes himself to O-line school, next door to the special teams school he went to. And he either takes his coaches with him or he gets another line coach and does some kind of a Mattison with Borberly.

Prediction Three—this year and next we'll see the O-line get the special teams treatment.

What's my main point? That the virtues noted above, and especially the third one—the habit of constant improvement—are important qualities and could well be the difference maker; that because of them Davie could in fact be the coach we're looking for.

A TQM coach is quite an asset; just remember what a shock that special teams improvement was. I look for more of the same.

But at my back I think I hear / an ocean of yes-but hurrying near.

And we sure can't ignore that sound. So let's take a break and we'll tackle yes-but in the next round.

Up next: Davie, Part Deux—But Does He Have the Mark?