Weis' Bowl of Cherries

Perhaps the hardest thing to think about while the game was falling to pieces yesterday was the affect that game could have on recruiting.. Who knows how the next batch of 17 year-olds could react to watching this prospective team go down in flames like that.. You can hardly imagine any way that even a master coach like Charlie Weis could turn a 47-21 drubbing into any kind of a positive sales pitch...

But this afternoon, I noticed this comment from Weis in his press conference... and I can almost believe that he could pull it off-- letting the boys see how you handle adversity, how you face it.

Q. You talked about how you have to think about what you're going to say to the team going into the locker room after the game. With a large number of recruits here, do you have to talk differently to them?

COACH WEIS: No, we don't let the recruits in the locker room until after we're done with our talk. We have a private locker room. There's very few people in this locker room now other than the team. The only three people other than the team are that allowed in there are the president, the AD and the associate AD, deputy AD, who football under his jurisdiction. Other than that, we have no one in there. There's no other people in that locker room.

When I talk to the team, I'm just talking to the team, okay? When I talk to the recruits, we had a bunch of recruits that we had a big dinner for last night, that was really a bowl of cherries having to do (laughter). I had to talk to them. I had to talk to all of them last night. I talked to them very matter?of?factly just like I'm talking to you. You can't hide the fact of what just happened. To be honest with you, having gone through appointments with a lot of these guys today, I was very encouraged at the positive response. They like the fact when you don't sugar coat it. You just be brutally honest with them.