![]() He gets up before dawn, an old coach's habit he can't break. "If I'm going to do retired," he says, "I'm going to have to learn how to handle retirement better." But because he worked such long hours, he never developed hobbies. He worked such long hours during most of those years that he promised Maura he would stick close by when he was out of football. He tolerates the horses and the dogs and the cat. They share their spread with six horses, four dogs, a cat and a type of parrot called a sun conure, which dive-bombs people when they walk through the house. They live in a gated community designed for equestrian living. She competes in dressage, where a rider puts a horse through precision movements, and down here there's a horse show every weekend. When Weis got fired by Kansas in 2014, just four games into his third season, he told his wife, Maura, to pick where they'd move next because they had always lived wherever coaching took him. We're down in Florida now, at a bagel shop near his home in Wellington, in Palm Beach County. How bored is Charlie Weis? Not only did he join the board of his homeowners association but he serves on a committee of the board of his homeowners association. He kept trying to help me find the right words to understand who he is.Īfter a while, I started to think that he might be searching, too. He described himself a dozen different ways. He didn't approach me for this story - I approached him - but he talked, despite his agent's advice to stop. Weis knows the labels that are stuck to him. He also wants to show that he's a good man. He wants to prove that he's still a good coach. He has quietly put out the word to friends in the NFL: If they need a coordinator after this season, maybe a quarterbacks coach, he'll listen. The last few years left him with a bad taste that maybe only football can rinse out. And all those things add up to what people believe you are.Īt 60, almost two years out of the game, Weis wants to coach again. You are not just what your record says you are. This is the thing about making a living under the heat lamp of sports, especially as a coach. But last year, in salary alone, he made more not coaching Kansas than the current coach at Kansas, and more not coaching Notre Dame than the current coach at Notre Dame. He points out, correctly, that active coaches get extra money from shoe deals and TV shows and such. Sitting at home, Weis made $2.5 million from Kansas and $2.1 million from Notre Dame last year, which made him in effect the eighth-highest-paid coach in college football. Both schools fired Weis in the middle of multiyear contracts they still had to pay off together, the dead money they owed Weis came to more than $24 million. ![]() But the numbers that generate fresh news stories and blog posts every year are the ones with dollar signs. Weis was 41-49 as head coach at Notre Dame and Kansas. His old boss with the Giants, Bill Parcells, famously said that you are what your record says you are. The other - an even worse profanity in sports - is loser. Now a lot of the public has reduced him to two words. For years, he was thought of as one of the best minds in football.īut in the recent past, all that success has faded into a distant dot, like one of those big cargo ships at the edge of the horizon. He helped design the Ferrari of an offense that Tom Brady still drives. He also knows what the top half of his r?sum? looks like: 15 years as an NFL assistant (Giants, Jets, Patriots) and four Super Bowl rings, the last three as New England's offensive coordinator. ![]() ![]() He knows what his buddies say about him: loyal friend, devoted husband and parent, kind-hearted, a good guy to drink a beer with. You start to wonder if he wonders if it might be true. He talks all the time about how other people think he's terrible. ![]() But Weis has done it enough to know there's truth behind most every joke. Ball-busting is their normal mode of conversation. Weis and Edwards used to hang out at the bar here back in the '80s these days, Edwards manages the place. We're having lunch in late July at an Irish tavern called Rod's in a town called Sea Girt, on the Jersey shore. This is classic New Jersey ball-busting from a guy who has been his buddy for 37 years. His friend Ed Edwards gives him the side-eye and says: "I know for a fact he's an asshole." I'd be willing to bet a million dollars that I'm happier than you think I am.ĪT THE JERSEY SHORE - "I'm tired of people who don't know who you are and they think you're an asshole," Charlie Weis says. I've got nothing bad to say about anyone. I'm going to be one of the most surprising and upbeat people. ![]()
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