Ole Miss coordinator Charlie Weis Jr. has always had a 'clarity of purpose'

Frank Verducci remembers a sense of unease spreading across the room.

The year was 2011 and Verducci was an offensive analyst on Will Muschamp’s staff at Florida, working under Gators offensive coordinator Charlie Weis.

The offensive staff was watching practice film. Weis played a clip and rewound it. Then he played it again, and again, and again, waiting on someone to identify the mistake. No one spoke up.

Weis then turned to his 18-year-old son, Charlie Jr., who was seated among the other coaches in the room.

“Eventually, he’d point to Charlie Jr. and say ‘Charlie, what should have happened here?’ Charlie Jr. would answer Coach Weis before the other coaches could tell him,” Verducci recalled.

This wasn’t a one-off occurrence. It happened a couple of times throughout that season. It may have been a bit jarring for some in the room who were new and unfamiliar with Weis and his son. Perhaps they were unaware that the teenager sitting in that chair was multiple years into his preparation to become a full-time football coach. Charlie Jr. had been watching tape long before he had a driver’s license.

“The people who had been around Charlie Jr. weren’t surprised though,” Verducci said. “At that point, he knew the offense better than some of the coaches who had just come into the system. That was the point Charlie Sr. was making. You better be on your game because this 18-year-old kid knows all the finer points. You better catch up to him."

Verducci remembers this vividly because of the impression it made, but he was hardly surprised by it. He worked on Weis’ Notre Dame staff for a single season in 2009 as the offensive line coach and run game coordinator in what was Weis’ final season as the Fighting Irish head coach. Verducci remembers Charlie Jr. being “omnipresent,” as he describes it, around the Notre Dame facility.

This period in Charlie Jr.’s life wasn’t as much a kid going to work with his dad for the fun of it, but rather the beginning of his schooling for a profession he coveted from the time he was a child -- a path that has led him to be Ole Miss' offensive coordinator at 28 years old.

In September of 2020, Charlie Jr. did an in NBC Sports interview with Jac Collinsworth, the son of former Bengals wide receiver and current NBC Sports Sunday Night Football announcer Cris Collinsworth. Charlie Jr. was asked when he could first remember wanting to be a football coach.

He reflected back to being an 8-year-old kid on the field inside the Superdome on February 2, 2002, in the moments after Adam Vinatieri’s 48-yard-field goal sailed through the uprights as time expired to deliver the New England Patriots a victory over the St. Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI.

His father was the offensive coordinator under Bill Belichick. It was the first of three Super Bowls Weis won with New England, kickstarting the greatest dynasty in NFL history.

“Seeing him lift the trophy up, being a little kid, I remember thinking I wanted to do that one day,” Charlie Jr. said.

Weis left New England to be the Notre Dame head coach in 2005. The Irish went to back-to-back BCS Bowls in Weis’s first two seasons, but 3-9, 7-6 and 6-6 seasons followed, and he was fired after the 2009 campaign.

“I think I learned a lot of lessons about the highs and lows of football,” Charlie Jr. told Collinsworth. “There are going to be really great times, especially in years with the success we had, going to Heisman ceremonies and big bowl games with Brady Quinn, and then some tough times with it not going as well and my dad getting let go.”

In the later years of Weis’s tenure at Notre Dame, Charlie Jr. was a teenager. The career aspirations he had as an 8-year-old hadn’t changed, but instead, had gotten more serious. He utilized the resources at his disposal. The Notre Dame facility was a classroom of sorts and Charlie Jr. was a studious pupil.

“He was around a lot, so after a while, it was just accepted that he was going to be in the meetings and in the building,” Verducci said.“He had that passion. He wasn’t in the office just to hang out. He was there to soak up knowledge and learn the game and pick the minds of the other coaches.”

Charlie Jr. held up play cards on the sideline during games. He scouted opponents for St. Joe’s High School in South Bend and recalled to Collinsworth going over to the Notre Dame facility after school and bugging graduate assistants to take a look at plays he drew up or pestering them with questions.

Apparently, some of those draw-ups were hardly scribbles. Just ask former Ole Miss offensive line coach John Latina, who was the offensive line coach on Weis’s staff from 2005-2008.

“There were times where his dad would come in and say ‘hey, Charlie Jr. drew this up and it looks pretty good. We are thinking about putting it in,’” Latina recalled. “I don’t remember if we ever actually put anything in. But I can remember a handful of times where Coach Weis would have something on paper that Charlie Jr. drew up.”

Two years after Weis’s firing in 2009, Charlie Jr. followed his dad to Florida, and then to Kansas where Weis was the head coach from 2012-2014. Charlie Jr. was a student manager for the Jayhawks and graduated with a degree in psychology. With his dad out of coaching, it was time for him to find his own way.

Nick Saban had heard enough about the son of Charlie Weis that he set up an interview between Charlie Jr. and then-offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin. In a 2018 CBS story, Kiffin tells a story about having heard that Charlie Jr. had a photographic memory.

Kiffin was skeptical. He handed the 21-year-old interviewee his credit card and driver’s license at dinner and let him look at it for five minutes. Charlie Jr. spat out Kiffin’s license and credit card numbers the next day. Three years later, Kiffin hired him as offensive coordinator at Florida Atlantic, making him the youngest offensive coordinator in college football.

Beyond the photographic memory and the advantages that came with being a high-profile coach’s son, it’s evident that his desire to forge his own path is something that drives him.

“When you have a coach that has coached at the highest level and won at the highest level, you aren’t going to look at his son like a normal 22-year-old,” Latina said. “Now, Charlie Jr. had doors open up for him. But what you do once that door is open is what matters. He impressed Nick Saban enough to get hired and made impression on Lane Kiffin enough to bring him to FAU.”

Latina was an assistant at Temple in 1983 under first-year head coach, 30-year-old Bruce Arians. Latina sees age as merely a number if you’ve got the skillset. He's not surprised at Charlier Jr.’s career path.

“If you’re good, you’re organized and you have the people skills, you’ll succeed,” Latina said. “I’ve never coached with Charlie Jr., but if Lane Kiffin brought him to two different places, he has great respect for him. That’s the most important thing.”

When asked about the opportunities he’s had at such a young age, Charlie Jr. points out that his preparation for this profession began earlier than most. In the NBC Sports interview, Collinsworth asked him when he thought people stopped viewing him as Charlie Weis’s son and began to view him as his own man and coach.

“I am not sure, maybe it hasn’t happened still for some people,” Charlie Jr. said. “Maybe in the (2019 Boca Raton) bowl game, when Coach Kiffin was gone and I was on my own calling plays that day, having a great performance. But I am just trying to continue to earn it as time goes on.”

The Owls put up 521 yards of offense in a 52-28 rout of SMU.

At the end of the interview, the younger Collinsworth congratulated Charlie Jr. on his earned success.

“Thank you, and you too,” Charlie Jr. said. “I know you’ve dealt with some of the same things, so keep crushing it.”

Ultimately, a photographic memory and being a coach’s son don’t make someone a successful football coach.

Neither hurts, of course, but now, as Charlie Jr. takes on the biggest challenge of his young career as the offensive coordinator of an SEC program, he can lean on over a decade of preparation and experience — just like any other coach.

With that experience also comes the task most coaches have of shaking off a poor tenure and rebounding elsewhere. Charlie Jr. was the offensive coordinator at South Florida past two seasons, when the Bulls went 3-18. Weis Jr. gets the opportunity to prove those years were more about the program and less about his ability.

"Not too many 14-year-old kids have such clarity on what they want to be and also have the wherewithal to pursue it at whatever cost," Verducci said. "For him, it was the hours and hours invested being in those meetings. Most of his buddies are out playing video games. Charlie Jr. was watching tape.”

It just so happens that Charlie Jr.’s preparation began as a middle schooler rather than a 24-year-old graduate assistant. The 18-year-old kid in the 2011 Florida offensive meeting room wasn’t trying to show anyone up or speak out of turn. He was doing his job and continuing his preparation for a career path he chose in the aftermath of a Super Bowl at the ripe age of eight years old.

"His clock got started way earlier than most,” Verducci said. “When you start at age 15 or age 17, by 28 years old, you are roughly 12 years into it.. Charlie is a humble kid. He was just answering a question.”