Posted by: Pete Roussel on July 24, 2012

Charlie Weis made a couple of interesting statements at Big 12 Media Day on Tuesday morning.

Like this one...  "I was offered other jobs (this off-season) for a lot more money, just so you know that."

When asked to identify which programs made offers, Weis not surprisingly declined to identify the schools.  (Sources informed me in December that Tulane approached Weis.)

He stated, "It's not important.  What's important is why did I take this job.  And let's look at it from my perspective.  You're coming into a team that was 3‑10 two years ago and 2‑10 last year.  Not so long ago, it's 2007 and 2008, and they're playing in the Orange Bowl and the Insight Bowl and winning.
It wasn't like it was 20years ago now.  Okay.  It was a short time frame ago that that football program was playing in bowl games and winning."

"So you say, okay, they were there, they're here, what happened?  How did they get from here to here and then how do you get back up?  And to be honest with you, I think it's a very challenging situation.  And it's one that, as I talked over with my wife and my son, we thought would be a very good challenge for us as a family but also very rewarding if it paid dividends."

Weis also reflected on some 'stupid' decision he made as a first-time head coach at Notre Dame.  Now, Weis is a different coach who won't make poor decisions based on inexperience.

He said, "Well, anytime you've taken a job and you go through an experience and you end up getting let go from a job, what you do after you have some time away is you kind of reflect and look back and say what things would I do different."

"I mean, I can't tell you the number of things that I looked at on that list and said:  Weis, how stupid can you be?  There's so many things you did the first time around, you sit there and say:  Why did you do that?"

"So the second‑‑ when you're doing it the next time around, you've already had that experience where those mistakes you can minimize.  And anyone who is relatively intelligent should understand when you make mistakes, you try to minimize those, and the strengths that you found, you've got to play into those."

"But from my perspective, one of the things early on I wasn't speaking to a bunch of the people, the alumni groups when I was at Notre Dame.  I didn't do that until they took the coaches off the road recruiting my third year there.  And that had a lot of people disgruntled, like this guy won't come speak to us. 
So when I took the job this year, I called up, I said, okay, when it gets to the month of May, I'll go anywhere you want, let's go, and let's go hit the state and hit it hard and let the people get a little touch of the Jayhawk football program as it currently stands.  And I think it's paid good dividends so far."

Kansas opens the season with three consecutive home games against South Dakota State, Rice, and TCU.

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