Mids' Johnson Just Wins

Paul Johnson went on about Charlie Weis, especially his nurturing of Brady Quinn -- how a rattled, young kid suddenly morphed into a Heisman Trophy contender.

"Completely different guy," Johnson said of the development of Notre Dame's senior quarterback since Weis arrived before last season.

Imagine if the Naval Academy coach had Quinn and 84 other scholarship athletes to run onto the field with today rather than the none who will face the 11th-ranked Fighting Irish in Baltimore. Paul Johnson would be working with some decent talent, no?

"Oh, I can't go there -- a zillion people want the job I got," he said through a slight Carolina drawl. "I could be the coach back home at Avery County High School real easily, too.

"The only thing I get frustrated about is the labels people put on ya' sometimes."

Labels are the arbitrary tags assigned in college football's myth-building business:

· Charlie Weis, offensive Zen master, Yoda with a headset. Savior of America's most storied program;

· Pete Carroll, carefree Californian who recruited USC back to prominence;

· Mack Brown, Trojans conqueror, the man who hated the BCS until it thrust his Longhorns into the national title game last season;

· Paul Johnson, homespun service academy coach, whose kids keep overachieving with that triple-option shell game.

What lazy excuses for identifying coaches and their programs.

"Mack Brown has done a great job at Texas, but I imagine my wife could win seven or eight games at Texas," Johnson said. "That's far different than the guy who's won seven or eight games at a place that hasn't won before he got there. That's the part that frustrates you."

Weis is Exhibit A in the mythology business. He's in such demand, he spent half his weekly news conference last week convincing the masses he wasn't going back to the NFL. Greg Schiano at Rutgers is now the "It" coach, his name bandied about as a replacement to Larry Coker at Miami.

He's the new Urban Meyer, who parlayed a gimmicky offense at Utah into beaucoup bucks at Florida. Before Bobby Petrino, John L. Smith was the hot name at Louisville. Who do you think the people at Michigan State wish they had hired?

Paul Johnson has done more with less at Navy than any climber in the sport. Yet his name rarely emerges when the inevitable vacancies beckon. Why? It's not because he's 49, has won everywhere he has been, took over a putrid program, went 31-13 and led Navy to three straight bowl games. It's certainly not because he's 93-23 his last nine seasons as a head coach.

It's because at some point in the warped, myth-building business, Johnson got typecast. He and his staff have run the ball so long, Southeastern Conference and Big Ten athletic directors don't even make a telephone call, figuring he'll bring the triple option to their school and frighten the NFL-bound recruits away. The thinking is, how could a guy grooming U.S. naval officers possibly know the first thing about developing a five-star recruit?

That ignorance keeps Johnson at Navy, where, it should be mentioned, he's completely happy and signed until the next decade. His peers know the tremendous job he and his staff have done, but that's not enough to kill long-held perceptions about a coach who exclusively runs the ball.

"That's the real joke: that people don't understand you have play to the personnel you have," he said. "We run because it better suits us. We run the ball because it kills the clock and keeps our defense off the field, because we don't have monster linemen to pass-protect, because we don't have a cannon-armed quarterback.

"Now, the other side of that is, we could pass 50 times a game and people could say, 'This guy can't coach a lick and they can't win a game.' But I was once told, I think before I got my first job, that they actually expected me to win."

Johnson used to throw, when he had the cannons. As an offensive coordinator in Hawaii, he called the plays that set all the school's passing records until June Jones took over. He makes no excuse for the triple option, especially after his former Georgia Southern players recently sent him a T-shirt with a litany of gaudy numbers on it from his days as an offensive coordinator and head coach there.

Between 1997 and 2001, Johnson went 62-10 and won two Division I-AA championships.

"I've heard it's a gimmick offense," he said. "Well, we sure had some consistency with that gimmick, didn't we?"

Of Navy, he said: "It's a tough place to recruit, but the kids get a great education and it's a noble cause. I'm not going to apologize for running the ball. I've always tried to do what gives you the best chance to win."

After the pageantry and the nostalgia, Navy-Notre Dame today is less a rivalry and more a case study in the haves and have-nots of college football.

Navy's starting quarterback this season, Brian Hampton, was lost to injury for the year. The Midshipmen's shot at ending the nation's longest losing streak to one school (42 games and counting) hovers somewhere between slim and impossible this afternoon. Notre Dame figures to roll, and Quinn figures to carve up Navy's secondary.

It doesn't make Weis any better or worse a coach than Johnson.

"If I had Brady Quinn, yeah, we might throw," Johnson said, facetiously. "In fact, I'd be pretty stupid not to throw it, wouldn't I?"