Irish Rip Rainbows In Hawaii Bowl

It might not be the Rose Bowl or a BCS Championship, but it counts—Notre Dame ended a 15 year run of postseason futility with a 49-21 rout over Hawaii in the Hawaii Bowl on Christmas Eve.  QB Jimmy Clasuen was the catalyst with 401 yards passing and 5 TD passes as the Irish ended a nine game losing streak in bowl appearances.
Irish coach Charlie Weis, recently given a reprieve of at least one year to turn the Notre Dame football fortunes around, was in a joking mood following the victory:
"I told the team that's the only thing I wanted [for Christmas]. I just wanted to win a bowl game.
"I heard it a hundred times in the locker room after the game and they wanted to know what I was giving them for Christmas. I told them: 'a flight home.'"
"I'm very happy for Notre Dame. This was a great step forward for us. It leads us into 2009 with a good taste in our mouth."
Clausen amassed his impressive passing numbers through an impressive and mistake free 22 of 26 evening with no interceptions.  Hawaii, meanwhile, did little more than bolster the case that the qualitative level of teams getting bowl bids has been stretched miserably thin.  Against a thoroughly overmatched Rainbow defense, the Irish essentially met with no resistance on offense.  Despite the disparity, the offense statistics for the game were fairly even—the Irish held a 478 to 358 edge in total offense but only a slight edge in first downs (23 to 22).  
The victory was no doubt a relief for Weis, as it allowed Notre Dame to finish with a winning record at 7-6.  When a program has only had 19 losing seasons in 120 years of football that helps when the higher-ups start evaluating performance.  Weis recently underwent knee surgery and called the game from the coach’s box in the stands as a result of his limited mobility.  The Irish coach noted how much easier it is:
"It's 10 times easier. It's night and day easier. I haven't been up in the box since Drew Bledsoe got hurt. ... You don't want to do that long term, but calling a game from up there is pretty sweet. As a head coach, you want to be on the sideline."
Of course with the Irish winning a bowl game for the first time since beating Texas A&M in the 1994 Cotton Bowl, there likely wasn’t many things that Weis *wasn’t* happy about.