AND LIKE THAT ... [THUD] ... HE'S GONE.

Fire up your "Notre Dame football won't mean anything until they beat an SEC team, but they'll be doing their part to feather one coach's nest for a while, haha!" headlines elsewhere, because this tickles us so much we're just going to get right out of its way:

Notre Dame made an initial "termination payment" to Weis of more than $6.6 million and will continue to cut smaller checks to its former football coach for the foreseeable future, according to federal tax documents obtained by the Tribune on Thursday.

Right, because now that they're all done paying Ty Willingham to not coach football (a public service, really), they've discovered they really like doing this sort of thing. It's nice to have hobbies, isn't it?

We need some more message-board tripe to close out this news, so how about "Charlie Weis is the Keyser Söze of contract negotiations?" IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE IT'S TRUE.