Coach quietly different facing former team

SEATTLE – That Tyrone Willingham might throw open the velour drapes on the window to his soul this week was, of course, more ridiculous than the presumption that celebrity is accountable to talent.

But then, that’s true of Ty any week, any day, possibly any point in his personal history.

He may have been the only kindergartner in history to boycott show-and-tell.

Nothing much changed Saturday after the school that dismissed Willingham without ceremony and with no small measure of grubby hypocrisy last December whipped up on the school that, days later, latched onto him like a life ring. In a meeting at Husky Stadium pregnant with melodrama, Notre Dame did everything it wanted on offense and everything it needed on defense to subdue Washington 36-17, an outcome more routine than rout.

Willingham, as we know, was done so wrong by the Irish he should have been a country song. That he was then scooped up by the Huskies, who Notre Dame just happened to owe a rematch, was certainly delicious grist for a sporting press bored with steroids alibis and NASCAR tantrums.

Not that Ty himself indulged.

“This was a football game,” he said Saturday, “that obviously was made to contain a lot of emotion.”

Oh, really? Made, as in manufactured? Nothing that evolved naturally?

For some of us, this is Willingham’s maddening conceit – that he is above or impervious to the baser emotions or plebeian gossip of his game. At least the man responsible for this Greek burlesque – Notre Dame athletic director Kevin White, who fired Willingham two years before his five-year contract was up and brought in Charlie Weis (though he really wanted Urban Meyer, who picked Florida instead) – beat feet away from questions all week, knowing full well he had some ‘splainin’ to do.

Willingham, as he does so well, wouldn’t deign to shrug, lest it imply that the questions carried any legitimacy at all.

Not sure, then, how he accounted for 71,473 people in the seats at Husky Stadium. A week ago, a turnout of 45,000 or so was announced as 61,183, so apparently it’s for the Huskies’ fiscal health that somebody make the games to contain a lot of emotion, hmm?

Then again, this was the same Willingham who could be seen going nutzo when he thought the zebras got it wrong on a pass interference call against Josh Okoebor with the score still 3-3. His body language told stories that his mouth wouldn’t.

“He still had the same demeanor,” Okoebor said, “but we knew he wanted it.

“There was a difference in practice. We knew he wanted the game bad. We feel real disappointed we let him down, because we could have won this game. He was a little different about it. He’s intense every game, but you could tell he had that extra ‘mmmmph’ this game.”

And why shouldn’t he? You get fired from Amalgamated Widget and hired by Conglomerated Widget; you don’t want to sell so many widgets that Amalgamated begs for mercy?

Maybe it wasn’t the emotion of the moment that concerned Willingham as much as this being some sort of referendum on his worth, either at Notre Dame or Washington.

There was, after all, a simplistic way of looking at this one. If the Huskies were blown out, as most expected, it would actually be a decent sign – that Willingham, contrary to published opinion, recruited well at Notre Dame. That the players he recruited as the Irish centerpieces – quarterback Brady Quinn and tailback Darius Walker, in particular – were prime-timers, that they only needed another season to blossom. And that he’s capable of delivering the same kind of players to UW.

The flipside being, of course, that he would still have to prove that he can deliver the coaching goods on Saturday.