With each passing day it becomes a greater possibility Kansas' 23-0 loss to Texas on Sept. 28 of last year will be the final game Charlie Weis ever coaches.
With most NFL and major college jobs now filled, Weis didn't get offered the jobs he'd like and didn't like the offers he got. “I think it’s highly doubtful that I will ever coach again,” he told Eric Hansen of the South Bend Tribune.
“Would you like the last thing people remember you by in coaching as being great and walking out on top? Of course, you’d like that,” he said said. “But, realistically, if you’re not a hypocrite about the things that are really important to you, why just go take a job in the NFL just so people will say, ‘Well you went out with a better taste?’ Again if the right fit was there, I would have coached a little longer. But it wasn’t, so why not go do some good. What good are you doing if you stay on coaching at this point? The only one you’re doing any good for is yourself.”
If this is truly it for him, Weis concludes a 35-year career that began as an assistant at Boonton High School in New Jersey and included stops with the New York Giants, New York Jets, New England Patriots, Notre Dame, Kansas City Chiefs, Florida and Kansas. He was highly-paid for what he did and, for some, will be remembered as perhaps the richest unemployed coach in football history. He received more than $5 million in buyout money from Kansas and up to $19 million from Notre Dame for following his exits.
Rather than buy his own chain of islands, Weis plans to use his newfound time and stockpiled money to advance Hannah and Friends, a charity he and his wife Maura started in South Bend to benefit the lives of those living with special needs.
“Obviously, it’s well-documented, people know every dollar that I’ve made, because everyone writes about it all the time but what it’s done for me and Maura is that it’s allowed us to be philanthropists and really do well by the special needs community," he said. "One of the things people thought, when I left Notre Dame, ‘Well that’s it for Hannah and Friends,' that we were just going to bail out of here. We’re completely the opposite of what those thoughts are. We’re totally committed. My daughter is already taken care of. She’s all set. We just think we can do a lot more.”