Tyrone Willingham Deserves No Mercy

OK, where do you go exactly now if you are a 0-7 football team in a complete death spiral with a lame-duck head coach?

Los Angeles, of course, to face the USC Trojans in the Coliseum.

Talk about throwing the Christians to the lions...this is going to be the least entertaining college football game in the long history of the Pac-10. The only way you could appreciate this coming game is if you are an S&M specialist! We are talking about 60 running minutes of humiliation without the honor of certain death at the end of the match.

In a normal universe, Willingham would have been fired last season. Everyone knew, including himself, that he was in over his head and had lost it. Only political maneuvering on the part of Todd Turner, the threat of NAACP involvement, and little advice from Bill Gates Sr. stayed Mark Emmert's hand.

What we get for that intervention is a week-by-week death watch that is going to bury his head coaching career forever. Every day Willingham prays for Scott Woodward to pop in the door to fire him and put an end to his torture. Every day it isn't going to happen, as Mark Emmert and Scott Woodward have decided to let Willingham die by his own hand instead.

It all makes sense. This season is totally lost, and the football program is even further behind from being respectable than it was in 2004. Why let an interim coach take the weekly abuse when you have coach Willingham to kick around each week? If you don't like this guy, you certainly don't want Woodward to fire him. Let him suffer, stewing in the cruel soup he has made for himself, till the end of the season.

Don't give Willingham the chance to pull the same type of crap his minions did for him on his way out the door at Notre Dame. He started the campaign yesterday by floating the comment that this was the most acidic position he had ever been in his life. He doesn't seem to get that he is totally responsible for this acidic situation. It was his acidic and lazy personality that got us here in the first place.

Don't fire him...the worst punishment you could give this guy is not letting him out of his contract early this year so he can go golfing in North Carolina. Let him wallow in the misery. Let all the stories come public about what a petty SOB he has been during his four-year reign at Washington.

The gloves are officially off in every segment of the Husky community. Even announcer Bob Rondeau gave Willingham a tongue-lashing in his postgame interview. Dick Baird even called for his head, and, for the first time in his Dawgman journalistic career, picked UW to lose a game. It is official, it is over, Willingham has zero support from top to bottom at Washington.

That still doesn't mean he should be fired. A sympathetic firing is way to good a fate for a man like Willingham. Only last week he was trying to run one of the true freshman off the team by having him run endless sets of stairs during practice. The kid's sin was that Willingham didn't feel he was Pac-10 material.

Even though Willingham offered him a scholarship last spring, he is trying to make the kid quit school before even his first semester is done. You have to wonder why a coach on the rocks would even bother with such a silly and dishonorable exercise? Is this truly a molder of men or a petty tyrant trying to fulfill one last vendetta on the way out the door?

Why fire a guy like that and give him what he wants? Let Willingham continue to suffer, and show him no mercy. Let him face the indignity of explaining each week why his team is among the worst in America in his fourth year at the helm.

Woodward and Emmert know exactly what they are doing!