Weis Jr., 25, stands with Kiffin at FAU

BOCA RATON, FLA. — Charlie Weis Jr. has been on the field celebrating Super Bowl wins. He’s worn a headset on the sidelines at Notre Dame games, studied under Nick Saban and interned for Bill Belichick.

He’s learned from the best.

And he’s a mere 25 years old.

Age is just a number to Florida Atlantic coach Lane Kiffin, a former coaching prodigy himself who decided to hire Weis Jr. — the namesake son of the longtime coach probably best known for his stint at Notre Dame — as the Owls’ offensive coordinator this season, letting him oversee a group that is expected to pile up a ton of points in 2018.

“From the time he was a little kid, this is what he wanted to do,” Charlie Weis Sr. said.

That makes sense. Then again, the time Weis Jr. was a little kid wasn’t all that long ago.

When his dad was leading the Fighting Irish, Weis Jr. went to high school literally across the street from campus. After school, he went to the football office and essentially was right back in class, learning every nuance of football. It didn’t take long for him to decide that he wanted to coach, and that’s the only job he’s ever had.

Now he’s believed to be the youngest offensive coordinator in major college football history. He will make his debut with the Owls on Sept. 1 against Oklahoma in Norman.

“Coaching, I felt, was my calling to help people,” Weis Jr. said. “You know, not just the schematics and the fun of all that stuff, but helping young players develop and become better people.”

His parents, he said, reacted thusly when he decided to enter coaching: “No, no, no,” he said.

Weis Sr., who dealt with negativity on the way to getting fired by Notre Dame and Kansas, doesn’t remember it quite that way. He said Weis Jr. was encouraged to be something like a doctor or a lawyer, a career that would have kept him off the roller coasters of emotion and scrutiny that most coaches face now after every win and every loss.

“But once it was pretty clear what the path was that he wanted to take, we just tried to help him along that path,” said Weis Sr., who has been to a couple FAU practices this summer and bought a luxury suite for this season’s home games.

As an undergrad at Florida, Weis Jr. was a coach with the offense and was tasked with prepping then-Gators coach Will Muschamp for weekly news conferences, educating him on that week’s opponent. He interned with the Patriots, helping chart the production of Tom Brady and the other New England quarterbacks. He had about a half-dozen jobs at Kansas when his dad was the coach there.

And when he went to Alabama as a grad assistant, he worked with Kiffin.

Weis has been someone that Kiffin wanted to have around him ever since.

“I’m trying to help him not make some mistakes that I made,” said Kiffin, who, like Weis, is the son of a highly successful coach. “But he’ll be fine. He’s a lot more probably balanced than I was at that age and more mature. So we do talk about that, but I don’t think he’s going to have issues.”