Seen here: Willingham with microphone
in down-position moments before
he moved it to up-position. Again.

Before this weekend, I’d watched at least the majority of 3 other Washington games. Not sure why. I wasn’t really looking to “scout” this team. I suppose I was relishing what could happen when Oklahoma took them on. I just sort of stumbled on a replay of their Stanford game. I watched last week’s game with OSU to get some sense of them and figure out what sort of stats I might want to investigate for the week’s “looking back” piece. And after those 3 viewings, I really thought I had an idea of how good or bad the Huskies are, but I suppose as a fan of a particular team in college football, you don’t really understand the aptitude of another team, or the lack thereof, until you see that team up against the one you know the best. We just saw the Irish bludgeon Washington, to the tune of 33-7, when ND played one of their rustier looking games. In other words: Oh my God. I had no idea they were that bad.

Yes, this was a 0-6 team. Yes, it was clear that Ty will be fired sometime between right this minute and not soon enough. But surely Washington can make the game look competitive for a half if the Irish weren’t sharp, right? Surely things will get interesting if the Irish lose the turnover battle or continue to stub their toes in the red-zone, no?

Well, actually, no.

Leading up to this game, I kept finding myself, be it in conversation or writing, insisting that those who do not follow Irish football had no idea just how bad Ty Willingham was as a coach, and thus could never understand the reality of his termination as HC of Notre Dame Football. But in truth, I also didn’t fully understand, because I had no idea it could get this bad. I didn’t really, truly understand just how bad “a 4th year of Ty” could be until last night. There were moments of ineptitude by UW’s players and staff so blatant and grandiose in their display of stupidity that an uninformed observer might think the Huskies were a caricature. Times when about-to-be-blocked Huskies had a look of “oh God, don’t hit me,” and about-to-be-fired coaches called absolutely bizarre plays like 5 yard TE drags on 4th and 18. There was the realization that the vaunted “massiveness” of the Husky line also came with a little-discussed body fat percentage hovering around 40. Moments when Husky defenders stopped giving chase because, from the looks of it, they were winded. There were 12 men on the field for the first Husky offensive play of the 2nd half and a failure to properly align in a max-protect punt situation (the mind boggles). And perhaps the saddest moment of all: A hammered-to-the-point-of-delerium Ron Fouch, QB of Washington, celebrating like he just scored a game winning TD after throwing up a prayer of a pass that barely, and I mean barely, missed the outreached defender’s hands - those of walk-on special-teams hero Mike Anello. Surely at some point, Knute Rockne must have said something about moral victories being for losers and the direct correlation between the celebration of such victories and the level of pathetic sadness involved.

Not really all that long ago, when HDTVs were still sort of a novel thing, particularly the flat-screen HDTVs, Best Buy hadn’t yet developed a chain-wide HDTV video demonstration. Instead, each store usually just showed off the TVs by showing off the area’s best HDTV channel. On one particular day back then, I walked into a Best Buy in Chicago. At the time, the best HD broadcast in Chicago was the local PBS station, and so about 100 large-screen, HDTVs were showing a documentary on northern oceanic wildlife. It was really quite a beautiful site. That area of the world, while rugged, came across remarkably well in high definition. The packs of seals, thousands of them across the shore, were just a sight to see. The baby seals, in particular, were quite entertaining.

And then the men with the clubs showed up.

And that’s when the screaming from the small children, and some grown adults, in the store began. The men on the 100 high definition televisions had shown up to poach the seals. And the preferred method of such poaching, apparently, and all kidding aside, was to club them to death. It was dramatic. It was gruesome. It was one of the saddest sights I’d ever seen.

Despite my abundant joy at the demise of Ty Willingham last night, I still got the same pit-in-my stomach feeling from that game as I got from that documentary. The Washington Huskies, in the 4th year of the Ty Willingham era, are dramatically awe-ful (sic). They are stunningly pathetic. And the poor kids in that program, who I am sure are by-and-large good people, deserve a coaching staff with at least 100 times the aptitude as the one they have. Perhaps they could interview Bob Davie.

Tricks and Treats:

• I’m not too worried about Clausen: That was a pretty mediocre performance by the Notre Dame passing game last night. I read and heard a lot about how Jimmy looked rusty, and at first I was thinking the same thing, but really I think Jimmy looked sort of greedy and the receivers looked rusty. Right around the time the 3rd offensive play by the Irish resulted in a 51 yard touchdown pass, I think Jimmy stopped respecting the Washington defense. He probably saw the same thing we all saw. Sure, Sam Young made a nice block to help spring Floyd on that play, but he made a nice block on a guy who clearly looked more concerned about not getting hurt by the blocker than about avoiding the block and making a play. I think right about then, Clausen decided to go into play-lot mode and see if he could just launch balls within the vicinity of his obviously superior receivers to get up by 28 points in the first quarter. As we saw with Clausen in the UNC game, he looked quite confident - maybe a little too confident. And instead of being up 30 at the half, as the Irish probably should have been, ND was up only 17 (and yet the game was pretty clearly over even then). I think the stat line will give Weis a lot of coaching material for Clausen this week, and I expect to see the more disciplined Clausen we’ve seen quite a bit already show up against Pitt.
• If the Irish want to stop stubbing their toes, they should stop kicking themselves: I don’t have data to back this up, but it’s certainly starting to feel like a relatively sound way of defending the Irish is to let them drive down the field into the red-zone and then implode. Part of that is the same greed you see Clausen display as discussed above. As soon as the Irish are 20-30 yards out from the end zone, you can see him trying to figure out which of his receivers wont get defensive consideration from the safety. Part of that is also some odd play-calling. That second end-around to Tate that resulted in a loss of ten yards was about as ugly as Tate’s TD end-around was pretty. And part of it seems to be a loss of concentration. How many times has a penalty stalled an Irish drive between 20 and 30 yards out?
• Woo hoo Jonas Gray!: No doubt every Irish fan perked up a bit when the 2nd string offense took the field and running back Jonas Gray showed that he’s got a ton of potential - aside from catching kickoffs. The kid can flat out play, and he runs in that style that makes defenders not want to tackle him. It’s very exciting, but what’s more exciting is what I’d guess he’d doing for the rest of the Irish rushing attack. It sure seems like Armando Allen and James Aldridge are “running with abandon” a lot more ever since Jonas started to get a lot of “good press” during Weis’ press conferences.
• And I thought the baby seals had it bad: Consider this: It’s almost certain that the Irish scout team regularly produced more on offense, imitating Washington, than the Huskies themselves put up on Saturday. Between the 459 yards the Irish gained and the 124 they allowed - and I use the term “allowed” in the strictest sense ever used within the context of a football game - the Huskies were left with a net yardage deficit of 335 yards. As we pointed out earlier in the week, the Huskies had actually dramatically improved their net yardage deficit with Fouch as the QB over Locker up to this week. This week, at the hands of the Irish, the Huskies suffered their worst net yardage deficit of the season by a full 80 yards. (Oklahoma beat them by 255 yards.) Sure, the Huskies have been out-scored by more this season, but they’ve not been beaten in the way the Irish beat them, and beat them, and beat them…
• It’s over: This marks the end of the Ty Willingham hate. We can’t imagine how we’d ever find the Irish facing Willingham again. Sure, his recruiting laziness might still come back and bite us again (anyone hear how Olsen is doing today?), but we’re done hating him. He’s now been moved under the mock-and-laugh category of public figures. He’s made more money than we ever will doing far less than we ever will, but hating him just for that would require hating a lot of people, and we don’t have time for it. This… this feels good.

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