Waving The White Flag

Believe it or not, the worst part for me about Notre Dame's historically bad 2007 football season hasn't been the actual losing, it's been the ferocious beating Our Lady's institution is taking in the media (particularly ESPN), the college football blogshpere, and on college football message boards. Of course, no article/post/comment gets very far without the invocation of the name of Tyrone Willingham, who ND rather deservedly fired in 2004 after three seasons. Florida fired Ron Zook that same season - actually midway through the season - in what was his third year, with Zook and Willingham having identical records the day Zook was canned. However, not one of the outlets mentioned above whispered a word of dissent about Zook's ouster, but have screamed bloody murder about Willingham's release ever since. You see, Tyrone Willingham is black - one of only a handful of black head coaches in the history of Div. I college football. He is now at Washington busying himself with running that program into the ground.

Taking a break from composing Installment #3 of "Things They Don't Cover In Marriage Prep Class", I surfed my favorite sports sites and was greeted by the customary "Notre Dame is racist because they fired Ty Willingham after only three years" theme, now updated to include "Notre Dame is racist if it doesn't fire Charlie Weis after this season". I could expound at great length why Willingham was let go after 3 years while superficially similar failures like Gerry Faust and Bob Davie were given 5 years and Weis is not going anywhere after this season.

But I won't. No amount of factual, logical argument will sway them, no amount of pointing out their own double standards and inconsistencies will make a damn bit of difference.

My reaction now, and ever forward, is thus:

Sweet leaping Moses on buttered toast. More "Notre Dame is racist" crap.

Fine. You win. Yup, you’re right, we Domers are racist. That’s why hired Ty in the first place and gave him what was at the time the most lucrative contract in ND history: out of sheer hatred of the black man. He wasn’t fired for lazy and ineffective recruiting and unwillingness to make staff changes; we were just tying to keep the black man down. We also hate fat people, which is why we hired Charlie Weis and are paying him even more money. Lord, if we could ever find a blind, homosexual, Jewish dwarf in a wheelchair who wanted to coach football, we’d melt down the Golden Dome into bars and gift wrap ‘em for him. But for now, we’re going to keep Weis, not because he’s a good recruiter and he is willing to make changes, but because we really enjoy making fat jokes.

Of course, most of all, we hate the Irish. Why else would George O’Leary have only lasted a week?