Tyrone Willingham Points Fingers on Way out the Door

So who exactly is responsible for Washington going 0-11, seemingly on the road to a perfect 0-12 season?

Tyrone Willingham seems to think he is only partly to blame, and that the blame must be shared with Gilbertson and Neuheisel.

You can make the honest point that once Barbara Hedges was hired the program started to slide downhill despite an early national championship during her tenure. Obviously she can take absolutely no credit since it was the final result of the machine that Don James and Mike Lude created at Washington.

The plan was never to completely destroy the football program because 85 percent of all athletic department funding is dependent on revenues from football. The ultimate plan was to make it answer directly to President William Gerberding who had grown jealous of its arrogance, autonomy, and success.

Hedges' not-so-secret agenda was to dismantle the machine over time and de-emphasize football. She made Jim Lambright's life a living hell. He retaliated by showing her no respect as he tried to battle what nobody else was seeing, or willing to admit they were seeing.

The truth was that she was totally incompetent. She was not just de-emphasizing the program. Her inept management skills were unwittingly destroying it.

The firing of Lambright followed by the hiring of Neuheisel is when the program truly headed in a new, unstable direction. He won and he made things fun, but he also skirted the rules, lied, and publicly embarrassed the university. He actually embarrassed them enough that they finally decided to fire him.

Even the firing was mishandled as he won a judgment against the NCAA and UW for around $5 million on the way out the door.

The hiring of Keith Gilbertson, who never really wanted nor was really suited for the job, was her final fiasco. Insiders all knew it was a mistake.

We all hoped for the best because everyone liked Gilby, but an underachieving 6-6 season followed by a lame duck season such as this one sealed his fate under the new AD Todd Turner.

Turner was a much better administrator than Hedges. He balanced the books, got the program compliant, and fixed most of the things that were wrong in the department.

He also decided to change the culture of the athletic department. Losing was suddenly OK if you did it the right way. He had some sort of antiquated, Olympian, Vanderbiltonian ideal that he wanted to imprint on Washington athletics.

Turner brought in a man he admired, Ty Willingham, to run the football program. He was well acquainted with Willingham and had bought his shtick earlier in his career when he tried to hire him at Vanderbilt. He thought he had the perfect man to run the football program.

In reality, Willingham was an unmotivated coach on the downside of his career who had lost most of his fire and was coming off a big paycheck at Notre Dame.

He wasn't an aggressive recruiter, even though he sold himself to Emmert and Woodward as one. He wasn't a hard worker, preferring to spend his afternoons on the golf course rather than getting ready for his next opponent or on the road recruiting the next star player.

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