Tyrone Willingham's firing as the Notre Dame head football coach shows one thing only: Notre Dame is now just like any other football school: it cares about wins, losses, money from bowls, and that's it. Thus, AD Kevin White's admissions that Willingham ran a clean program, with exceptional integrity (a main reason he was hired) and that Willingham's kids maintained or exceeded the academic standards that Notre Dame expected all prove two things: (1) Willingham upheld his side of the bargain; (2) Notre Dame failed to uphold its own institutional integrity by making him the first Notre Dame head coach in nearly a half-century to not coach there at least five years (and the first in more than 70! years to coach less than four seasons at UND).
Pat Forde hits this note in his column linked in the title. And he's right.
I don't buy other claims: (1) Willingham should not have been fired because he's black and there are too few black head coaches -- this is ridiculous because Notre Dame needs to do what it thinks is best for itself and by holding him to the same standards it would theoretically hold to any other coach, it treats him no differently; (2) Notre Dame's decision is racist in some fashion because Willingham only got three years to coach, not five like every white coach at UND since the late 50s -- this is also wrong because no one is entitled to continue coaching at UND; and the decision says more about how UND really is a normal football school now that ignores its coach's academic achievement and clean program records, unlike 20+ years ago when it refused to fire Gerry Faust (who was clean and whose kids graduated) even though he was clearly over his head from a coaching perspective.
The fact is that Notre Dame knew Willingham's up and down track record (check the 5-6, 3-8 downers amongst his 9-3 winners at Stanford) when it hired him, but did so to have him restore integrity and the proper priorities to the program. He did. The only conclusion: UND failed itself.
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