Yes, I'm still talking about this. As an update, Urban Meyer, the man ND wanted to replace Ty, decided to take a job at Florida instead. Considering the fact that the reason Ty was fired last week was presumably so that ND could land Meyer before he was off the market. Another botched hiring attempt by the ND athletic department. No doubt we'll find an adequate replacement eventually. This is Notre Dame, after all. I'm personally pulling for Charlie Weis, the offensive coordinator from the Patriots. Bringing in a successful coordinator from the NFL seems to have worked at USC and Virginia...
After a few days of reading various sports editorials and rants, the consensus seems to be this:
Tyrone Willingham was a great guy who led a clean program. He just didn't have the success on the field he needed to have. I can agree with that. We got blown out and shut out more times than I care to count recently. So maybe his recent performance hasn't given us what we fans and alumni seem to really want. I myself would love a championship. But I still don't feel right about firing him.
In this post, I retract my earlier sentiments in the direction of "this is the end of honor in Notre Dame football," because it seems to be the opinion of several experts that the Notre Dame of '66, '77, and '88 was not all that immaculate. I'm not enough of a sports scholar to speak one way or another on that, so I guess I'll concede that in the past few decades, Notre Dame has not been as honorable or classy as it has always pretended it was. I will reiterate that for the past few years, I think we have most certainly become as respectable as we had been claiming to be.
What troubles me about this is that Notre Dame has joined the rest of the college football world, and not in a good way. For a while, it seems that success in college football has been measured by how well a college program measures up to professional football. Miami, for example, is a very successful football program. In this, it's stressed that if the point of college is to prepare you for a career, then why not prepare you for the very lucrative career of professional athelete? I don't know if I can argue against that. Not everyone is cut out to be a lawyer or a CEO, after all. I just never personally found that to be a "real major." But I'm not that much of an athelete either, so again, I can't judge.
Ideally, we'd have a team that was not only respectable and honorable, but one that also won all the time. But given the choice between the two, I'd prefer the honor over the glory. Not everyone agrees with me on this. There are plenty of honorable teams out there who lose all the time--like the service academies, for example--but there aren't any sports legends about that.
What breaks my heart is that I believed that Tyrone Willingham had the chance to get the aforementioned dream: Honor and glory. He promised success if we would have the patience to let him get his system settled in. 3 years is not enough to see whether he would have made good on that promise. Yes, I'm an excessively patient person, but I really think he deserved at least the five years that Bob Davie got. Other coaches have turned around their programs around in less time, but most of them aren't moving in a radically different direction. Ty came in and tried to change an option-oriented offense to a "West Coast" offense. I consider that a major change that takes time. But we'll never know now, I guess.
