History will say Tyrone Willingham’s .583 winning percentage in three seasons as Notre Dame head coach places him somewhere between Gerry Faust and Bob Davie in the school’s pantheon of coaches, tucked in a nook between mediocre and average.
Statistics, in this case a 21-15 record, seldom have told a bigger lie.
There was nothing ordinary about Willingham’s time under the Golden Dome.
He inherited a program in utter disarray, a football family mired in dysfunction after the George O’Leary resume caper. Only from that vantage point can everything be measured about Willingham’s three seasons leading the Irish.
Notre Dame became an easy punch line in the months that followed O’Leary’s clumsy dismissal, a national joke until Willingham stopped the laughing.
The Irish went 10-3 in Willingham’s first season in 2002, winning games the way Lou Holtz used to and changing the subject back to football on campus.
The school’s first African-American head coach in any sport never made it to a Bowl Championship Series game, the new standard at Notre Dame, and was fired Tuesday before his first recruiting class began its senior year.
To that end, Willingham probably made more progress off the field than on it, and two middling seasons that followed his first one confirm that.
Still, Notre Dame finds itself on shaky philosophical ground in defining Willingham’s tenure in victories and defeats when it still wants to define the mission of its football program in broader terms.
In that context, the context of the university’s carefully crafted image suggesting college football is about more than just Saturday afternoons, Willingham will go down as an exemplary Notre Dame coach.
Some would say he represents the 21st Century prototype that the board of trustees that forced this decision now will try to copy.
He left town Tuesday with a similar winning percentage that he brought from Stanford, but Notre Dame officials instructed everyone then to ignore Willingham’s numbers and focus on his uncommon integrity.
Under the intercollegiate model to which Notre Dame says it aspires, the instruction sounded reasonable at the time.
If the university had used the same rationale in evaluating Willingham after this season, he would not be out of work today.
He never embarrassed the university, he upheld its high academic principles and he stayed true to his personality and the enormous responsibilities of the job.
It may not have been good enough to keep his job or earn Willingham a spot on the Mt. Rushmore of Notre Dame coaches.
But it was good enough to distinguish his tenure from most of the other men who have occupied the same hot seat in South Bend.
THE FIRST TIER: GOLDEN FOREVER
Knute
ROCKNE
TENURE: (1918-1930)
W-L: 105-12-5
NAT’L TITLES: 3
Frank
LEAHY
TENURE: (1941-43, ’46-53)
W-L: 87-11-9
NAT’L TITLES: 4
Ara
PARSEGIAN
TENURE: (1964-1974)
W-L: 95-17-4
NAT’L TITLES: 2
Lou
HOLTZ
TENURE: (1986-1996)
W-L: 100-30-2
NAT’L TITLES: 1
Rockne is and always will be to Notre Dame football what Webster is to the English language. Leahy’s run of four national titles from 1941-53, with a two-year break for Navy duty, guaranteed a generation of college football fans would grow up identifying with Notre Dame. Parseghian performed the first rescue after the four-year Joe Kuharich-Hugh Devore tenure had run Notre Dame football into the ground. Holtz pulled a modern-day Ara when he revived the program in the late 1980s.
THE SECOND TIER: KEPT THE LUSTER
Dan
DEVINE
TENURE: (1975-1980)
W-L: 53-16-1
NAT’L TITLES: 1
Tyrone
WILLINGHAM
TENURE: (2002-2004)
W-L: 21-15
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Elmer
LAYDEN
TENURE: (1934-1940)
W-L: 47-13-3
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Terry
BRENNAN
TENURE: (1954-1958)
W-L: 32-18
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Devine seldom gets the attention he deserves because his quirky personality made him hard to embrace for the Notre Dame media, but people forget he won a national title in 1977. Willingham’s winning percentage fails to reflect the way he restored the pride in the program when it looked headed south in a hurry. Layden went 47-13-3 from 1934-40 in the post-Rockne era, a winning percentage of .770 that was better than Holtz’s and Devine’s. Brennan deserved better than to get fired on Christmas Eve after going 32-18 from 1954-58, a legacy seldom appreciated.
THE THIRD TIER: LEFT SOME SMUDGES
Gerry
FAUST
TENURE: (1981-1985)
W-L: 30-26-1
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Bob
DAVIE
TENURE: (1997-2001)
W-L: 35-25
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Hunk
ANDERSON
TENURE: (1931-1933)
W-L: 16-9-2
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Faust became the emblem for overmatched college football coaches, but nobody loved coaching at Notre Dame more. Davie made it to a Bowl Championship Series game, which Willingham didn’t, but his approach and results lacked consistency as the job overwhelmed him at times. Anderson won 63 percent of his games, a good mark any other time but during the years after Rockne died.
THE FOURTH TIER:PROUD TO HAVE WORKED THERE
Joe
KUHARICH
TENURE: (1959-1962)
W-L: 17-23
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Hugh
DEVORE
TENURE: (1945, 1963)
W-L: 9-9-1
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Ed
McKEEVER
TENURE: (1944)
W-L: 8-2
NAT’L TITLES: 0
Both Kuharich (.425) and Devore (.500) were worse than Faust; their biggest contributions might have been setting the stage for Parseghian. McKeever coached one season when Leahy went to the Navy.
