I would like to officially announce my candidacy for the recently vacated position of men's head football at the University of Notre Dame.

Like panhandlers in a pothole or fireflies in a firefight, Notre Dame stands little chance of attracting quality coaching candidates, and my credentials speak for themselves:

I played tackle football for six years between middle school and high school and approximately six weeks in junior college.

I was the offensive coordinator for my high school class's powder-puff football team as a junior and senior, and I eventually had sex with three offensive starters and one defensive starter before we graduated.

I double-majored in Tecmo Bowl and Super Tecmo Bowl at Avondale West Elementary school, followed by a masters in Madden 96 at Jardine Middle School and a PHD in Madden 97 from Topeka High School.

My current user record on Madden 97 is 328-0, and this is the third different game cartridge I've owned, meaning my career win total is at or near 1,000. I discovered a glitch in the game that beats man-coverage for a touchdown 9 times out of 10, and I manually alter the game's defensive schemes at the line of scrimmage to consistently produce 80-sack seasons from the strong-side linebacker.

I've had Madden 97 seasons where my offense averaged 100 points a game and my defense surrendered fewer than 10 ppg. (most recently with the Lions. Yes, the Lions)

I've also worked as a sports writer at suppressive, scared, small-town Midwestern newspapers like the ones you might find in and around South Bend, Indiana. This means I can walk into a postgame press conference after a two-point, Senior Day loss to Montana State and regurgitate politically correct status-quo to a roomful of middle-aged white dorks who were picked last in gym class growing up.

Yet and still, my foremost qualification for the position of head men's football coach at the School of Our Lady is neither my vast football expertise nor my championship record as a coordinator, head coach and football executive.

No, the attribute that best recommends me to replace Charlie Weiss is the frequency with which I've been fired in my adult life. While in college, I lost two graveyard gigs at local gas stations and a summer snow-cone-making position. My post-graduate work also includes a premature dismissal from my duties as a newspaper sports editor in 2006.

I was subsequently laid off from a stringer position at another dying daily as recently as May, so I'm well-practiced in the many ways of losing a job with class and dignity. If you're going to be head coach of men's football at the University of Notre Dame, you're going to be fired, so you're going to need experience in being fired.

I will admit I'm not catholic and I've only seen Rudy once or twice, but I have seen the Da Vinci Code six or seven times, and perhaps it's time for a fresh voice with new blood at the School of Our Lady.

The situation in South Bend is, after all, bleak. The Heisman Trophy has other havens in the 21st century. The Fighting Irish don't fight long on the rare occasion they're invited to a BCS brawl. The NFL is suddenly looking elsewhere for its future hall-of-famers. Navy owns the Irish in Notre Dame Stadium. USC owns the Irish period.

Jimmy Clausen's getting punched in the face at dinner after the final home game, and he's not even close to the biggest reason the Irish are losing.

Coach Weiss has been honorable and honest in accepting accountability for the decline of the dynasty, but the collapse commenced before his arrival and will continue after his departure.
Notre Dame will never be Notre Dame again, and while their terminal coaching carousel doesn't help matters any, I'm just the man to be there when the golden dome finally comes crashing down.

It's time to recognize and acknowledge a new generation of talented teenagers who don't want to go to South Bend, Indiana, for college. There are better high school football players and more of them in places like California, Texas, Florida, the Mason Dixon line, and most of them don't want to be in small, cold places with small, cold people.

That's why the Big 10 sucks now too, in case you were wondering. That's why neither Navy, Army nor the Air Force compete for national titles anymore. That's why Florida, LSU, Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and USC do. That's why there's both parity and parody on the modern college football landscape.

Notre Dame is also trying to live in two worlds long after the rest of the limelight programs have left 1955 in the past where it belongs. Football players have to go to class at Notre Dame and they have to actually hit the books as hard as they hit each other. The Fighting Irish have to stay out of trouble, stay out of the white girls, stay away from the boosters and stay off the Mary Jane.

Just ask Randy Moss.

And now Notre Dame foolishly thinks it can maintain integrity and purity while at the same time sustaining a dominant football program. The two used to go hand-in-hand, but Lou Holtz is long gone, and asking your football coach and his "student-athletes" to propagate a parallel universe is asking too much in an NCAA world where the competition has long since forsaken morals and ethics.

Notre Dame still gets good players, but not nearly enough of them. Our Lady no longer has the quality depth or the succession of blue-chip recruiting classes it once had, and while the Irish first-stringers still compete with most other schools, the new Notre Dame is consistently losing games in the second half and losing them late in the season.

As head coach, I will remedy this recruiting regression by signing players exclusively from the Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba, Bossanova, Cassonova and Casablanca.

I will convert hockey players into linebackers and safeties, skiers and speed skaters into tailbacks and wide receivers, polar bears and grizzlies into interior linemen. I will put a golden helmet on French-speaking federalists and Scandanavian exchange students alike, and I will turn foraging Eskimos into Fighting Irish.

I want to give the proud alumni and nationwide network of golden-domers a golden shower.

We will win again at Notre Dame ... six games the first year, seven the next, and three or four in each of my final two seasons ... so help me, Touchdown Jesus.

I will also cancel Notre Dame's exclusive TV contract with NBC so nobody has to watch.