Things are NG at ND

Tyrone Willingham is out. Oddly enough I was going to post about ND's woes on the gridiron and was going to wonder outloud about when he was going to get canned. An hour is the difference between being prescient and "yeah, right."

Willingham will land on his feet. He is a very good football coach who caught a program in decline. He has been there for three years (which amounts to 2 years and 360 days longer then ND's last pick), which is not long enough to be able to rely on your recruiting classes, IMAO.

Notre Dame faces a bigger problem. It has one of the most rabid fan bases in the country, think of them as one big mass of George Steinbrenners, and tremendous national appeal. But I do not think the Independent status works for them anymore. It seems that they need to hook up with the Big East or Big Ten (they could chalk up one against Northwestern). I suspect the Big East, especially, will bend over backwards to lock ND in.

I think the bigger question is the will to win on the part of the Administration. Can ND attract the scholar-athlete it needs? Or does it need to relax its standards? Boston College has chosen the high road, and I believe that ND will do the same. But BC has not been a force in college football in 20 years. That will not satisfy the ND alumni, who are living in the world of Ara Parseghian and the Four Horsemen.

Give credit, though, to the large state schools. Plain truth is that the difference, academically, between Notre Dame (or BC or Stanford or Duke or any other top private college) and Michigan or UCLA or Virginia or UNC is just not as great as it once was.

ND's problems have little to do with Tyrone Willingham. Good luck to him and I hope things turn around for Notre Dame.

Update: Urban Meyer is the odds on favorite to take over and he seems to be the easy choice. Notre Dame could do alot worse. I do not buy in to the "home grown" approach, but you could argue that Willingham had two strikes against him because of that. We will see.