THE MEN who run Notre Dame’s athletic department had every right to do what they did yesterday, relieving a good man of the most impossible job in college football, ending a grand experiment, heading in a new direction.
They had every right to show Tyrone Willingham the door after another un-Irish-like season, after 6-5 (on top of 5-7), after getting drummed by USC, after watching themselves grow ever more distant from their most recent national championship, now 16 years and counting.
It is their shop. It is their department. It is their football team, and they can do what they want with it, same as Florida, same as Stanford, same as any of the other 116 Division I-A football programs in the United States. You set your own standards, agree to your own levels of satisfactory performance after all. If Notre Dame feels 21-15 isn’t good enough, that’s their call, no one else’s.
But Notre Dame certainly does forfeit some rights by making that decision, by terminating Willingham with two years left on his contract, and that is something the institution must understand clear away, right from the start, as they enter into a brave new world from which they have, to date, remained steadfastly apart.
From this day forward, Notre Dame no longer can act as if it operates above the fray, however murky and muddy, in which the rest of college football operates. No longer does it get to cite anything – exacting academic standards, high moral fiber, exceedingly high ethical precedents – to explain away its shortcomings on the field, or its higher place in the pantheon of college sport.
That ends now.
That ended the moment athletic director Kevin White stepped in front of a bank of microphones in South Bend, Ind., yesterday and declared, “We simply have not made the progress on the field that we need to make. . . . From Sunday through Friday, our football program has exceeded all expectations, in every way. But again, on Saturday, we struggled. We’ve been up and down and sideways a little bit.”
You know what? He may be right. There were a lot of us who cheered Notre Dame for hiring Willingham in the wake of the George O’Leary scandal, a lot who praised the school for becoming one of the few institutions who’ve ever taken a chance on an African-American head coach. There were a lot of us who wanted the Fighting Irish to be a lot better than they were these past three years, to make sure this story ended the way it should have ended.
It didn’t. It doesn’t. Willingham’s teams won some games, got blown out a bunch, looked only vaguely competitive Saturday night in Los Angeles. In today’s college football universe, 21-15 is more than enough to get you fired, regardless of the color of your skin. Ask Ron Zook.
The problem is that Zook’s bosses at Florida never promoted the pretense of residing on a plane higher than everyone else. Notre Dame did. Notre Dame, for years, reminded everyone they were different. Their students went to class. They wound up in honor societies, not police blotters. And they never, ever, fired a coach before his contract was up. Not Terry Brennan. Not Gerry Faust, who seemed to beg to get fired every single week of his five-year tenure. And not Bob Davie, who had a similar record (21-16) three years into his stay in South Bend.
Well, the players were the first to shatter that illusion a few years ago, tarnishing the Golden Dome in a fit of unseemly off-field actions. Now it’s the administration’s turn. Willingham goes, after 21-15, the same way he would’ve been gone if he’d been 21-15 at Florida State or Oklahoma or Tennessee or Auburn, any of the secular schools from whom Notre Dame always presumed itself such a safe remove.
Not now. Not anymore. From now on, from this moment forward, Notre Dame is just like everyone else. No better. No worse. They’d better hope it’s worth it.
