As the coaching carousel keeps turning, the newly-available Ty Willingham might be expected to be bitter. After all, his record at Notre Dame was essentially the same as Charlie Weis' after three seasons. Yet Willingham got the gate from the Domers, while Weis got the dreaded vote of confidence from his athletic director this week. You wouldn't blame Willingham if all of a sudden he started talking like Yosemite Sam with a habanero seed stuck in his throat. Gibbering, barely coherent anger would seem to be an appropriate response to such a regrettable circumstance.Whatever you may think of Willingham as a coach, he said the right thing about Weis, and about coaches in general.
"It's not just my issue, it's a college football issue - we have to give coaches a chance to do their job," Willingham said Thursday from Seattle, where he recently was fired as the University of Washington's coach after four seasons, the last of them winless.Indeed, it's not right, as I said earlier this year. The situation hasn't gotten better. Who's to blame?
"Because now we have coaches ... especially some of the minority coaches ... they are losing their jobs after 2 1/2 years. That's not right."
All of us, of course. We're the ones who forget that the NCAA, as a whole, finishes with a .500 record every season. We're the ones who somehow seem to think that every coach is Bob Stoops or Urban Meyer and can be expected to deliver a national title no later than their second season. We're the ones who want every coach to be Johnny Majors on the field and Johnny Carson off of it. Is that too much to expect?
Go ask yourselves how many fanbases in NCAA football are truly happy with their head coaches right now. I would wager you come up with fewer than 20. Sure, every message board has its share of doomsayers, the sort of permanently honked-off crabcakes who aren't happy unless they're upset about something. There are still far too many of us who think every season should be a 10-win season and all our team's bowl games should be played no earlier than January 1st.
Willingham has tried his hardest to stay out of the Weis situation, and he's gone the extra mile to avoid injecting any discussion of race into his comments. There's little question, though, that most of the head coach positions offered to African-Americans recently have been difficult situations. Granted, Turner Gill should have gotten everybody's attention last night with Buffalo's stunning takedown of Ball State. Kevin Sumlin will take Houston to a bowl game in his first season.
But Randy Shannon has found the going difficult at Miami. Sylvester Croom is gone from Mississippi State, a place where success is as rare as subzero temperatures. Ron Prince got a whopping two and a half seasons to prove himself at Kansas State. All those fanbases will claim, with some justification, that their opinion of their coaches has or had nothing to do with race, and they may well be right. It's hard to argue with Willingham's firing after a winless season, after all.
It's also hard to ignore the fact, though, that the trend of naming a top assistant as "head coach in waiting" has only extended to a single African-American coach, Kentucky offensive coordinator Joker Phillips. Maybe Ty Willingham is being too generous.
