Lies, Damned Lies, and Ty Willingham
Posted Aug. 28 at 7:00 am by Damon Agnos
Photo by Billy A, licensed on Flickr with CC-BY-SA-2.0
Washington coach Ty Willingham is everything college football claims it cares about and little of what it actually does. He’s a Rorschach test for the sport’s conscience, which itself resembles a Rorschach test until you look closer and realize it’s a giant skid mark. College football is big money, which is why Willingham is Washington state's highest paid employee. It's big money cloaked in a fiction about yessir kids who care not about big money but about study hall and the gridiron dreams that get boosters tumescent in their Dockers.
At 76 wins, 76 losses, and one tie for good measure, Willingham’s record is the very definition of mediocrity. But his players attend class regularly and showboat sparingly. And he stands board-straight, shoulders back, the picture of fitness and military-grade discipline. And he’s a black coach in a sport whose hiring record is abysmal, a sport that enriches largely white coaches, administrators, and media and enthralls largely white fans with a largely black cast of unpaid talent. As Notre Dame learned, to fire Ty Willingham is to put the lie to the dream of college football as a wholesome, spirit-filled supplement to education and to force a re-examination of some problematic racial dynamics.
But with his dismissive, hardass persona, he sure doesn’t make it easy for the soapbox standers and high-horse riders. Rank authoritarianism isn’t the stuff of pep rallies and Gipper speeches. And public contracts that rival the budgets of small school districts don’t really warm the heart either. Perhaps beneath that dour exterior, Ty is laughing all the way to the bank.
They say this season is do or die—he’ll either win and be re-signed or lose and be let go. College football’s calling the bluff of the man who called the bluff of college football. Ty Willingham doesn’t deserve his money, but college football deserves him.
Comments
Cheers Damon! Couldn't have said it better myself...
Posted Aug. 28 at 11:46 am by Nick F.So... Basically you're saying that Ty Willingham is just plain too uppity for his money.
Posted Aug. 28 at 4:46 pm by TracyNo, I'm saying that college football wants him to personify its fantasies about itself so it doesn't have to confront its own rotten core, but instead he's just mediocre and surly.
Posted Aug. 28 at 6:20 pm by DamonWillingham doesn't deserve his money, college football deserves him, Husky football doesn't deserve another losing season.
Posted Aug. 29 at 10:47 am by Keegan