In the 2007 college football season, Notre Dame is learning the hard way what happens to programs that make poor decisions in the hiring and firing of coaches.Whether those decisions be a function of the incompetence of administrators or the meddling of boosters, the results are always the same: a descent into mediocrity—or worse.
Notre Dame is currently serving a penance for the unceremonious firing of Coach Tyrone Willingham, and for the misguided hubris behind it.
On the heels of Notre Dame's 0-4 start, many critics have speculated that current coach Charlie Weis will receive better treatment than Willingham did—because Weis is white and Willingham is black.
This article isn't about the legitimacy of those claims, which will be dissected throughout the season. The point of emphasis here is that, whatever the cause of a coaching change, the failure to handle it carefully can severely damage a program.
Given the deep emotions involved on all sides, the relationship between a coach and an institution is far more than a mere business partnership—it's a marriage, and when marriages go sour the effects are painful and long-lasting.
Notre Dame is hardly alone in this experience.
After the 2000 season, the University of Arizona forced the resignation of coach Dick Tomey, who had won a share of the Pac-10 championship in 1993 (the first and only in the school's history) and taken his teams to seven bowl games (the most ever for an Arizona coach).
Why?
A losing season here and there. You can't win 'em all—but someone at Arizona apparently thought Tomey should.
After Tomey came John Mackovic, who was forced out before the end of the 2003 season when the administration joined a player revolt against him. Since then, the Wildcats have endured losing records under coach Mike Stoops, and it's still unclear just how long the school will be paying the price for its hasty, petulant missteps.
Colorado is another tarnished example. Coach Bill McCartney won the school's only national championship in 1990, but was forced out over his religious beliefs (remember the Promise Keepers?).
The Buffaloes ended up with Gary Barnett, who among other things allowed a sex-and-drugs scandal to develop right under his nose, and callously dismissed sexual assault allegations made by his female place kicker.
The state of the Colorado program today?
Pretty pitiful.
A firing is not necessarily the fault of the school—some coaches fully deserve to be fired (or not hired in the first place). Still, the repercussions are almost unavoidable.
Who deserves to be fired? It doesn't really matter—not for the "Program," that is. The key is handling it well.
Bad hirings and bad firings are like bad divorces. Their effects linger for years, and they're best avoided by employing more wisdom and prudence first place.
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about 1 year ago
Oustanding article!
about 1 year ago
Good article.
In this day and age of big bucks, media scrutiny, and school board pressure, coaches are commonly fired prematurely.
To throw some perspective in the mix, the fact of the matter is that not everyone can win. For every team that goes 10-0, another has to go 0-10. E.i., the aggregate of all team's records in .500 every year.
So the coach has become the fallout guy. Sometimes it's fair, sometimes it's not.
about 1 year ago
People are obsessive over their football. With all of the money it generates and the popularity on the business and fan sides, performance has to be accounted for, both good and bad. Because it's such a complex game and coaching strategy plays such a big role, they often take responsibility for both success and failure. It's not fair, but it's the way it goes (especially in college where free agency and trades do not exist).
about 1 year ago
Great stuff no coach should be fired before he has a full recruiting class come through.
Ty Willingham got screwed over badly.but since they set the precedent then Charlie has to go to.
about 1 year ago
It is exactly BECAUSE ND fired Ty after only 3 years that there is no way they can give Weis the same treatment. Two-straight quick coaching changes will leave a program in complete disarray just ask Stanford. If ND fired Weis, it would almost certainly be the final nail in the program's coffin.
As ND AD Kevin White has aptly said, Weis will not be fired because the long-term trajectory of the program is undoubtedly on the up and up following Weis's ability to attract recruits from the backyards of teams like USC, Florida and Tennessee.
Where was the program's trajectory headed under Willingham, you ask? Simple to this very day: 0-4 with a team completely devoid of upperclass leadership and talent. Rest assured that had Ty not been fired after 2004, he would have after this year at the very latest when his recruiting deficiencies came to bear poisonous fruit. Those are just the facts. ND administration saw it coming, and made the decision to bite the bullet sooner rather than later.
Call it hypocritical if you want, but ND had a football program to save.
from about 1 year ago
I don't follow ND football too much, but I heard that Willingham recruited well, with players such as Brady Quinn. Now that they are gone, we see that Weiss has been recruiting players who are way too slow to keep up with the competition. Is that a possibility?
from about 1 year ago
Simply put, no. Ty put together a fantastic class (Quinn, Samardzija, Zbikowski, et al) after the the 2002 smoke-and-mirrors 8-0 start, and then just stopped. His next class was flat out the worst class in ND history. His final class was similarly mediocre, and ended up a mixed bag as Weis scrambled to fill holes in the short time he had before signing day. If there were such a thing as suing for "coaching malpractice," recruiting two (repeat, 2) offensive linemen in two years would provide about as good a case as you could make.
Countless sites have explained this far better than I could, but here's one that sums it up very well if you're really willing to read in depth about the situation:
http://bluegraysky.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html#7655074004624535555
Since, Weis has amassed two top-10 classes, and the current class of verbals is ranked #1 by many sites. The speed is coming oh yes, it's coming and is in fact already here among the true freshman class. Weis's most important job this year will be to hold on to the verbals he has now (no easy task at 0-4), and continue the program's upward flight past this season's severe turbulence.
about 1 year ago
Weiss did more with Ty's players than Ty did. Give Weiss's players a year experience and then you'll be able to judge the situation fairly.
about 1 year ago
In the fall of 2004, two particular programs fired coaches after only 3 seasons. Florida fired Ron Zook, whose team's records had been 8-5, 8-5, and 7-5 (23-15 overall). Zook allegedly was a great recruiter but a poor coach. Notre Dame fired Ty Willingham, whose teams' records had been 10-3, 5-7, and 6-6 (21-16 overall). Willingham allegedly was a great steward of Notre Dame's academic and character expectations, but an average recruiter and coach.
I agree that ND is paying for the "sin" of pride -- it expected that Urban Meyer would choose to coach the Irish. But this goes back further, to the George O'Leary debacle that led to Willingham's hiring, and even back to the alleged forcing out of Lou Holtz that led to Bob Davie's hiring and firing.
Most people who point to Notre Dame's current string of losses and cry "hypocrites" or, worse, "racists", are over-simplifying the situation. I don't agree that all programs that unfairly dump coaches are condemned to future failure -- see Florida -- but I think that this article is much closer to the truth than most current rants about Notre Dame.
- Lou
about 1 year ago
True, Willingham made some mistakes; but it WAS his kids that took Weis on a joy ride his first two years. And, like it or not, the administration and fan base's utter rejection of Willingham made it very difficult to recruit. He was as good as fired when he got there; he wasn't the guy the fans wanted and they made it very clear, even a little bit during his inaugural 9 win campaign. He had no shot, ever.
And I thought Charlie Weis was an offensive genius; I don't care how bad the talent is, put the ball in the end zone once in a while! 3 games without a TD is a disgrace, especially for a prominent program like Notre Dame. If the knock on Willingham was that he couldn't recruit, and yet, he still managed to win 5 or 6 games in his final two years, how bad does that make Weis, who can't score with a lot of his juniors, sophomores and freshmen on the field? They may very well be good in a couple of years, but a QB can't do anything without the 10 other guys around him. Good luck, Brandon Claussen!
about 1 year ago
I don't know if everyone that talks about Ty's awesome 1st season remembers what it was like. He won every one of his games based on the awesome defense that Big Bob had set in place. How many games at the start of that season were won on a superb defense backing a terrible offense. Does no one remember how the nickname that that same defense gave the irish offense that year was the "Pre-Punt Team"?
Fast forward, and you have a coach who doesn't even get respect from his players, when his benched quarterback, Carlyle holiday, steps up to the podium at a pep rally, and chooses to step right past his coach without shaking his hand, as every other speaker does and has done.
2003 saw defenses forces to play around the force that was Julius Jones, allowing the green Quinn time to get used to the game, and turn into the quarterback that he is today. Now, all of our offensive threats left the same year (including walker leaving early), and we have a quarterback trying to learn the new speed of things with a green line, green RBs, and green revievers. It is going to take time.
Having said all of that, I agree with the article that ND screwed themselves with the way / timing of the firing of Ty (If i remember correctly, he didn't even coach the bowl game that year that was in the D-Back stadium), and we were left with an entire year of recruiting pretty much down the drain. If we had handled that better, we would be having a much better season right now. As it is... we'll get better and more seasoned as we go on this year, and are going to come in to next year returning a ton of players that are eager and ready to start smashing some faces from the get go.
about 1 year ago
It's amazing to me how you ND fans come up with a reason to support your failures. The fact is that it was a tradition for ND to allow a coach to complete a contract before firing. Regardless of what anyone thought of Coach Willingham, he put some numbers in the wins column. Weiss isn't doing that. The part that's so hilarious is that there's no outcry. 0-4? Are you serious? Ty is challenging USC tonight and though they'll probably lose his "poorly recruited players" look pretty damn good. The only bummer for me is that ND doesn't play Washington this year. That would be the ultimate cap for this story. Notre Dame mistreated Coach Willingham and for that they're paying the penance. It might take 5 seasons, it might take 10 to right the ship. And everyone will continue to blame it on Coach Willingham, I'm sure. I don't know if it's racial, although it seems on the surface to have racial tones. I really think it's just poor management. And for the record, Zook did get run out of Gainesville prematurely. He also wasn't the guy the Bull Gators wanted because he wasn't a big Offensive minded guy. I guess Florida got away with that one but they deserved the same thing that ND is getting for their treatment of Zook.
about 1 year ago
If Notre Dame loses next year or the year after, you can blame Notre Dame. Right now, the logic of recruiting is playing out in that the juniors and seniors are Ty's last two classes.
Ty's a good coach but let's see if he get Washington much above .500.
Notre Dame has no tradition regarding coaches, other than that before 1996, bad one's weren't tolerated and were replaced by good ones. You who talk about tradition also subscribe to the recent trend in sports fandom of talking ghetto smack.
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