<p>i even thought the team was pretty good this year. i mean, look at their schedule!!!!! they beat very, very good teams in Michigan(ranked 12th), Tennessee(ranked 17th), and Navy(9-2). the teams they lost to: boston college(by one point), usc(ranked 1st), pittsburgh(ranked 19th), Purdue(was ranked as high as 15th i believe). can you realistically expect to rebuild to the height that is required in beating those programs and playing that hard of a schedule in 3 years? i mean, ty, because he is simply amazing, cranked out as many wins as the notre dame team could!! given just one more year, i think he would be competing with the big boys once again like in nd's glory years. he was recruiting the necessary players, keeping the program respectable, AND raised academic standards. </p>
<p>I'm sorry, but top 10 programs are NOT built in just a couple years!!</p>
<p>by the way, michigan's schedule is a joke. willingham was fighting an uphill battle in inheriting a poor team, a damaged program reputation, and ARGUABLY the toughest schedule in the nation. he almost reached the top of the mountain, but i guess the program administrators decided to push him back all the way down and replace him. i guess this is why you have so many respectable notre dame alumni and school administrators embarrassed and disgusted, huh?</p>
<p>Are you kidding?? Pete Carroll went to an SC team in total chaos and turned them around overnight. Stoops went to Oklahoma and did the same, as did Teford at California and so on. ND was going no where under TY. Chalie Weis the offensive coordinator for the New England Patriots will be the new coach. Press conference Monday. Go Irish!</p>
<p>The liberals at ND wallow in politically correct gestures. The same types that pushed out Leahy years ago and Holtz. Their comments are drivel at best.</p>
<p>pete carroll 28-10 first three years(9 against ranked teams)
bob stoops 31-7 first three years(8 against ranked teams)
ty willingham 21-15 first three years(16 against ranked teams)</p>
<p>hmmm, those numbers look pretty comparable. i wonder what happened to these guys after those three years?
stoops and carroll coach the #1 and #2 teams in the nation now. willingham? oh........
he was just fired.</p>
<p>bob stoops and pete carroll's turnarounds are considered some of the most impressive in college football history. I'm not saying willingham definitely would have created just as an amazing turn around, but it looks like he was on his way to "an overnight turnaround".</p>
<p>yes, even though ty's nd team played as many ranked teams as those two teams combined in those three years, his record still was not as good. but the fact is, if his name can even be mentioned with these messiahs of college football like this, why the hell would it even be mentioned that he should be fired?</p>
<p>I agree with ace that ND had a good team this year and were well coached. Michigan was ranked 7th (overrated, which even as a wolverine I will admit) when ND beat them, Tennessee was ranked 10th when ND beat them, and Notre dame was the first team to give purdue, who was actually ranked as high as 5 a run notwithstanding their loss. THAT SAID, I wouldn't exactly call Michigan's schedule a "joke." It is true that the big ten sucked this year, but iowa, minnesota, purdue, ohio state :(, and of course michigan have traditionally had strong football programs. All of those teams were ranked at the beginning of the season, indicating a strong big ten from last year. The big ten this year was, if anything, inconsistent-i.e. kyle orton going from heisman frontrunner to benched against northwester, wisconsin having the number one defense in the country and possible national title contenders to losing to michigan state and iowa, iowa losing to arizona state and michigan and then winning out, michigan state nearly beating michigan, beating wisconsin, then losing to penn state, etc etc. The big ten, will, however, be better next year, but yes I know that no schedule compares to notre dames</p>
<p>Ty's name "even mentioned with these messiahs of college football----" No one is mentioning Ty in the same breath with Carroll and Stoops except you. ND, under Ty showed no signs of waking up the echoes with any CONSISTENCY. If Weis can't get it done; then ND will go the way of Army.</p>
<p>i hope the best for him. but with this shadow over nd, they're going to have a rough next couple of years. add to the fact that weiss has limited college experience, and has never been a head coach... good luck to him, he'll need it.</p>
<p>i like how you refer nd's president and alumni openly criticizing the program as "liberals". what brought that along?</p>
<p>he showed no signs of waking up? did you watch any games this year? tennessee, purdue, michigan?</p>
<p>oh wait, im sorry, they were SUPPOSED to beat sc and every other team on their ridiculous schedule, right?</p>
<p>i said his name CAN be heard in the same breath as those coaches. if you saw those win-loss records by those turnaround coaches and willingham, they are comparable. which shows those coaches started off pretty much at the same speed as ty was going with notre dame.</p>
<p>The key word is CONSISTENCY, as noted above. Yes, I saw those games. And since I live on the West coast I saw many of the Stanford games when Ty coached the Cardinals. Things were no different; a few good wins; some bad losses, many by blowouts. No one who knows football thinks Ty is a great coach. As for Weis; he has Super Bowl rings as an offensive coordinator plus: Everywhere he has coached his area of responsibility has performed at a high level. By the way, I just don't follow ND football I also keep track of what is going on at the university itself. There are battles within the larger community of the ND leadership about the direction of the University. Some want ND to be a University that happens to be Catholic and others want it to be a Catholic University.</p>
<p>As I indicated above; in my view elements within the University see the Irish football tradition as a throw back to the pre-Vatican II Catholic as outsider, immigrant, religious minority (Protestant nation) phase of Catholic life in America. There are those who would like ND to join a conference and join in as it were. Others; see ND football as a beacon of tradition, which is in short supply these days.<br>
I once met Lou Holtz, for example, he was a ND man. Davie, and Ty are not ND men. I liked Faust because he understood ND. His failing was he wasn't ready to be a head coach. If he had started somehwere else he would have been a great ND coach. But don't take my word for it; Dave Durerson former player and member of the boar of trustees said yesterday the dispute over Ty has to be understood in the larger context of other issues at ND.</p>
<p>I can't feel too sorry for Ty. When you make over a million dollars a year, and are still getting clobbered by 30 points by USC in your third year, you haven't earned your paycheck. Sorry, Ty...</p>
<p>I'm amused at Monk Malloy's belated shock at the firing, as if he'd never heard anything about it until it was already a done deal. My take on that is either (1) Malloy runs the kind of organization that enables million dollar high profile employees to be fired, cutting him out of the loop, or (2) he's being a bit ingenuous.</p>
<p>I'm sick and tired of hearing about how academic standards make it impossible for the Irish to return to their former glory. The standards were the same back when I was a student there in the early 1980's, and Notre Dame did just fine. They were high when Lou Holtz was there, but he still pulled off a National Championships. The problem is not with the standards, it's with the past two coaches who, regardless of what kind of good men they were, were not up to the job.</p>
<p>Go Charlie Weis!</p>
<p>Now, if the place will just let me son in....</p>