Show them the wins
It was the day of the multimillion-dollar messiahs at College Inc.
Coaches toting fat contracts nimbly roamed the money-green football landscape – a world apart from the classroom grind of academia – aiming to lead their new teams to the promised land of bowl-game riches.
College Inc. is all about winning and money, keeping the alumni happy and the checks flowing. Higher education? Well, that’s a nice phrase, but it has nothing to do with the business of football at even the best of schools chasing the No. 1 ranking and New Year’s Day glory.
Nobody outside the NFL is into the business of football more than Notre Dame.
The Irish reached out with a reported $12 million over six years to lure Charlie Weis from his job as offensive coordinator of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.
Throw in whatever the Irish gave Tyrone Willingham, ousted two weeks ago, to buy out the last three years of his reported $1.2 million a year deal, and it shows how serious they are about winning.
“Bringing in character kids that will make the university proud is important,” Weis said Monday. “But it’s all about winning games. That’s why there’s a coaching change. I’m here because expectations weren’t met. My job here is to raise those expectations.
“How long is it going to take us to get to the top? I’m not going to predict that. But I can tell you this: You are going to have a hardworking, intelligent, nasty football team. I hate to include the ‘nasty’ but that is part of being a winning football team.”
Now there’s a man who speaks Notre Dame’s language, an alum who never played for the Irish but has loved them and suffered with them.
Yet what will the Irish do if Weis doesn’t deliver a BCS bowl or a high ranking in a few years? Fire him, too, and dangle millions more in front of another would-be messiah?
Weis is returning to South Bend, Ind., in the midst of what former Irish football player Dave Duerson, now a member of the school’s Board of Trustees, described as a period of great dissension.
A few days ago the Rev. Edward Malloy, retiring in June after 18 years as Notre Dame’s president, said he was embarrassed that the school had fired Willingham with his winning record and unimpeachable integrity.
Malloy’s assistant, Chandra Johnson, the school’s highest-profile black administrator, shaved her head in protest and Malloy expressed concern over a growing trend of schools that seek “messiah coaches.”
Willingham didn’t stay unemployed long. With a deal that also could be worth $2 million a year with incentives, he landed amid the wreckage of 1-10 Washington.
The Huskies will be happy to pay every cent of that if Willingham can do what he did at Stanford – take his team to the Rose Bowl. They’re already pretty certain he won’t put them into the same kind of mess Slick Rick Neuheisel did before he was fired a year and a half ago for gambling on NCAA basketball.
“Integrity, discipline, excellence, someone who would always make us proud,” Washington president Mark Emmert said of Willingham’s qualities.
And lest anyone forget the real reason for the hiring, Emmert added:
“And someone who could win at the highest level, someone who knew the West Coast and someone who will be here for a good long time.”
A good long time in college football these days is not as long as it used to be.
Willingham was 21-15 in three seasons at Notre Dame – but after an 8-0 start in 2002, the Irish went 13-15. He didn’t last long enough to see his first recruits graduate.
It should be interesting when Washington hosts Notre Dame on Sept. 24 next season.
Stanford gave up on Willingham’s replacement, Buddy Teevens, after three years, and now has tapped offensive-minded Pittsburgh coach Walt Harris to resurrect its beleaguered program. Harris signed a five-year deal less than three weeks before he leads No. 19 Pittsburgh (8-3) in the Fiesta Bowl against Utah.
Among the 117 NCAA Division I-A schools, there have been 18 coaching changes this season. A few were resignations, one step ahead of the pink slips. A couple – South Carolina’s Lou Holtz and UNLV’s John Robinson – were retirements.
The rest were firings, mostly because of their teams’ records. They might have been good coaches, might have been good teachers, might have kept the kids in class and on track for graduation. But college football in Division I-A is no less a merciless business than the NFL.
“From Sunday through Friday,” Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White said on the day of Willingham’s firing, “our football team has exceeded all expectations in every way.”
The trouble for Willingham was that at Notre Dame and a lot of other schools that have their priorities wrong, Saturdays count more than all the other days combined.