After pressure from students, fans and big-money donors became too much for Notre Dame to ignore, the university fired football coach Tyrone Willingham on Tuesday, apparently because the university bigheads still envision the Fighting Irish as a football team that should be among the nation's elite every year.
Willingham's 21-15 record over three seasons, including a 6-5 mark this year against what was among the nation's toughest schedules, simply didn't cut it, despite upset wins over Michigan and Tennessee this year.
Willingham's player performances outside the stadium - in the classroom or in other spheres of campus life - were, by most accounts, superb. Even Notre Dame Athletic Director Kevin White said, "In a lot of ways, this program hasn't been healthy in a long time."
Still, Willingham was fired, even before the Irish's final game of the season, the Insight Bowl on Dec. 28. The move was so shocking to some players that the team met on Tuesday night to decide whether to even play the game. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the team decided it would play, but school officials said the matter was undecided Wednesday.
Now all the college sports moralists have come out of the woodwork to bemoan the firing. They're crying out that the university's cover has been blown, showing that winning at all costs is now preferred at Notre Dame over the "winning the right way" approach the school used to employ. And the money that comes from winning, they say, is the root of such corruption.
I wholeheartedly agree that Notre Dame, like many, many schools around the nation, has let greed and pride ruin its once noble mission. But as a little kid growing up in the years just after the Irish's last national championship in 1988, I've seen the signs of the ever-growing hypocrisy for years. Anyone who needs Willingham's firing to clarify this trend clear has been shielding his eyes for too long.
For as long as I can remember, Notre Dame has been the only team in college football to have its own contract with a national network, NBC - or the Notre Dame Broadcasting Corporation. Every single home game I've been old enough to care about has been on national television. And I'm sure those broadcast rights aren't just given away by the university.
I even remember watching the halftime of one home game where the television crews stayed fixed on the field to show a bit of the filming of "Rudy" that was going on while the real teams were in the locker rooms. At the time, I thought that was so cool, but later, I understood the financial gain the university got from the mere exposure the film provided, let alone any fees the filmmakers had to pay the school for the field and other expenses.
When I was almost 12, I got a new college football game for Christmas. For some reason, I just happened to look at the case binding. There, I read that "EA Sports College Football '96" was officially licensed by the NCAA, the College Football Association and the University Of Notre Dame, which apparently superseded the other two.
By middle school, Bob Davie made it painfully clear to me that Notre Dame cared more about selling its brand across the nation than it did about putting a prestigious product on the field. Several of those teams rarely deserved to be on ESPN3, let alone NBC.
Willingham, after a bad season two years ago, seemed to have his program at least headed in the right direction. And he's never been able to coach seniors that he's also recruited.
But for once, the bigheads were impatient. And while I think it's a bad one, the move does show a desire to win ballgames.
The moralists can cry high treason now. But the worst crimes were committed long ago.
