Analysis: UW awkwardly dumps Willingham
Tuesday, October 28, 2008 12:35 PM PDT
By Gregg Bell
The Associated Press
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E-mail this articleSEATTLE — Tyrone Willingham and Scott Woodward sat side by side, no more than a few feet apart and looking in the same direction. But Washington's now-fired football coach and the new athletic director who forced him out were far from together.
Cold? Instead of microphones, these two should have been speaking into ice picks.
Willingham took his normal place at his weekly news conference on Monday, then flatly announced: "We have come to a decision that at the end of the 2008 football season they will move in another direction with the head football coach at this university."
Yet Willingham didn't come to that decision at all.
Woodward, university president Mark Emmert and the thousands of Washington fans and alumni disgusted at the Huskies being 0-7 and 11-32 in Willingham's three-plus seasons as coach did.
When asked if this was his decision, the stone-faced Willingham said, "Uh, no."
When asked if he ever considering resigning, Willingham was even quicker to say, "No. It's just not in my makeup."
It was an odd, awkward day for what used to be one of the proudest football programs in the West, if not the country.
Woodward said he and Willingham first talked on Oct. 19, the day after a home loss to Oregon State, and then continued to meet all last week to discuss this delayed firing. Yet when the Huskies held a routine team meeting on Sunday night, a day after another embarrassing home loss to Notre Dame — which fired Willingham four years ago — the issue never came up.
Only one player knew Willingham was out Monday when the stoic coach and the AD walked into a conference room inside Hec Edmundson Pavilion. The only reason quarterback Ronnie Fouch knew was because Willingham told him when he saw the redshirt freshman seconds before he announced his own dismissal.
Willingham called the inability to tell the team before the public "unfortunate," but added that was because players were scattered across campus in classes all morning.
When Jake Locker walked into Hed Ed about an hour after the news broke, the injured star quarterback said to a school staffer with half a smile, "You could have told me."
Then, to make the day more bizarre, Emmert said hours later that Willingham knew he was gone last week.
"We pretty much reached that decision after the Oregon State game, and Scott had communicated that to coach Willingham," Emmert said.
That was before Saturday night's 33-7 loss to the Fighting Irish, in which the Huskies scored with 2:56 left against what Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis said were "guys who never play." That narrowly avoided the Huskies' first home shutout loss since 1976.
"The Notre Dame game was very unfortunate and it certainly didn't help matters," Emmert said.
Later, Willingham trudged across town to a restaurant to conduct his usual Monday evening radio show. There, the fired coach talked and forced smiles among festive purple, gold and white balloons. Dozens of fans and boosters watched and others across the region listened live to a proud, nationally respected figure renowned for successfully molding young men having to talk more about being fired.
But not yet. There's five more games first, beginning on Saturday with a thankless task at No. 7 Southern California.
"I can't say it's easy," Willingham said. "But I made a commitment to these young men and to this university."
Woodward said the timing of the announcement was to salvage any edge in an already lost recruiting year. One of the top recruits in the state, defensive tackle Deandre Coleman of Seattle's Garfield High School, recently reneged on his verbal commitment to Washington.
"This probably opens some minds that have been closed," is how Woodward put it.
It may not be persuasive to those who feel that despite his lack of victories on the field, a man of integrity and values deserved a better handling of his Huskies' demise.
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