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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Don't worry about it, BGS. You can skip this one.

To borrow a phrase, Jason Whitlock can eat a Matt Hayes.

And God damn him even further for making me write this missive about effing Notre Dame, but I have to. Jason Whitlock wrote this garbage...

Weis' new 10-year contract, reportedly worth between $30 million and $40 million … that strikes me as racist.
... so I am compelled to respond. Because Jason Whitlock's an asshole. Because there is a certain subset of black journalists that have carved out careers exclusively by calling people racist. Because there's absolutely nothing wrong with anything Notre Dame has done in the way it's handled Tyrone Willingham.

Why was Willingham fired when Bob Davie was given five years to fail in? Because of Bob Davie. If you reversed the two Notre Dame careers of the bumbling head coaches, Willingham would have gotten five and Davie three. By the time the Willingham era was spiralling into year three of total ineptitude, Notre Dame was over a decade removed from prominence. They had a short fuse, and--this is key--it had everything to do with what happened on the field and in recruiting and nothing to do with Willingham's race, unless you think that Ron Zook is passing.

Tyrone Willingham was Zooking Notre Dame. Anyone who saw his teams play could see that his 8-0 starting record was built on the shifting sand of fluke turnovers and fortuitous bounces. When the bounces stopped coming, so did the wins, and so did the recruits. The real reason Willingham went down in flames will hopefully be apparent in exactly two years, when the fruits of Davie's labors and Willingham's one good class evaporate and the Irish are left with a motely crew of handicapped midgets and Norwegian whalers on the offensive and defensive lines. The writing was on the wall; each year of Willingham's continued employment would be paid back with two additional years of onfield ineptitude. Believe me, I pay more attention to this than you do to your feed trough, Whitlock. As an opposing fan I gloried in the idea of Years 4 and 5 of Willingham. I am the canary in the coalmine.

Then Weis comes in, immediately starts racking up a metric ton of recruits that will have to play very early, demonstrates that Brady Quinn is not in fact functionally retarded, and nearly beats OMG USC to send the nation into a tizzy. So when publishes a very public, very plausible story that a former NFL coordinator who had been angling for an NFL job previous to taking a collegiate one and is apparently experiencing great success at his new home could bolt to the NFL, it is a wise and PR-savvy thing to make a sweeping, meaningless gesture, which there's a 99% chance this is.

Whitlock, you sanctimonious idiot, have you ever considered the fact that "buyouts" exist? I guarantee you that Notre Dame has an option to buy Weis out of his ten billion year contract that is almost identical to the one they had before they redid it. Even if they've unwisely tied themselves to Weis for ten years basd on seven games it's besides the point. Weis' fat new contract is unprecedented in the history of college football. No coach has ever gotten a ten year, 40 million dollar contract after seven games before.

So riddle me this: how was Notre Dame's decision to treat Willingham exactly like any other coach in history racist?


Whitlock's constant cries of racism obscure the fact that the person doing the most damage to black coaches here is Whitlock himself. What does he think he's doing for black coaches around the country? Don't think for a second that any other football power is going to hire a black coach without thinking long and hard about the repercussions if things go awry. No one wants to get pilloried unfairly as racists by Whitlock and his ilk (Scoop Jackson on line 2) when the coach gets fired or doesn't get an extension or just has a bad day. As long as "black coach" is synonymous for "giant target for media assholes," teams with success will reasonably avoid them like the plague, leaving the publicity-seeking Mississippi States and New Mexico States of the world to hire them into death jobs and then fire them from their death jobs.

But I guess Whitlock has made a career out of this crap. He's a "controversial" idiot for money. This is what you're doing, Jason: you're selling out black coaches across the country at the behest of The Man so you can get your sweaty paws on some loot. You're the Uncle Tom of college football.