Is Willingham Racist?

When Tyrone Willingham publicly decried the lack of head coaching jobs for black Americans earlier this year, he made an irrefutable point: that something in the system is broken. {snip}

“You’ve got to explain the numbers,” said Willingham. “There’s more than one answer. But it’s alive and well in certain places, yes.”

A little research shows that he should be pointing the finger in the mirror.

Willingham, together with enablers like John Saunders and Mark May, has done as much to hurt the cause of minority coaches as any other single person I can think of. I would argue that he’s created new minority roadblocks others must now overcome.

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{snip} The stepping stone to a head coaching position is a coordinator position. Granted, Willingham skipped this step on his way to the head coaching position at Stanford, but being a coordinator is almost a prerequisite to the head coaching position (note that it certainly doesn’t guarantee success.)

Yet in his seven years at Notre Dame and Washington, Willingham has hired exactly zero minority coordinators.

Zero. That’s remarkable for someone willing to throw the charge of racism on the table. Zero into the position that is the stepping stone to the head coaching chair.

In contrast, since Willingham left, Notre Dame has filled both of its coordinator positions with black coaches.

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So who’s racist? The school that hires a minority, or the head coach who hasn’t hired one in seven years?

There would have been no better way to further the cause of minority coaches than by the notoriety gained by being a coordinator at Notre Dame. I don’t know what the minority pool looks like for Head Coaches, but theoretically you would think there has to be a bigger pool to choose from when hiring for a coordinator position.

Yet Tyrone Willingham hired whites for those key positions . . . again, the ones that make up the pool for the next head coaching ranks.

“You Have to Explain the Numbers.”

But his worst transgression, by far, was legitimizing the idea that it’s okay to blame racism without cause for personal failures.

Willingham was given the biggest stage in the college football world and failed. He was given one of the biggest stages in the Pac-10 and failed. There’s no loss of dignity in failure. There is great loss of dignity in blaming racism without cause or proof.

Worse, at Notre Dame he did it the coward’s way, by not challenging charges of racism in the press that he knew had no factual support, even when put on the spot by John Saunders, all while banking millions from Notre Dame with the knowledge that he had already contacted the University of Washington about leaving Notre Dame.

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This isn’t just one data point. Willingham’s pattern of unassociated blame has continued at Washington.

When Willingham’s job was on the line last year, Athletic Director Todd Turner intervened, lining up power brokers while James Bible, president of the Seattle-King County NAACP, requested a meeting with UW President Mark Emmert to discuss “the value of Coach Willingham to this community.”

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If you can’t fire a black head coach with cause (and an enormous payday), than what signal does that send to other schools who might hire a minority head coach?

I’ll answer.

To a school, it means you may not be able to fire him when you want to despite performance on the field. {snip}

I know this because “fireability” is a key employment proposition at every major company. {snip}

In college football, however, it’s not just cost which is prohibitive—it’s also the negative publicity that comes with firing a minority head coach. Willingham’s passive-aggressive tacit approval of racial attacks on Notre Dame showed everyone how painful a process that can be.

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So if you’re an AD on the sideline, you’re thinking, “Do I need this headache? I just want a winning team.”

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