I was listening to the Jim Rome radio show a few days ago at lunch and he had Tony Dungy on for an interview. I have never been a “fan” of the Bucs or Colts but I do like him. Dungy has always been a coach that preached high character, both from himself and of his players, and he has always seemed like the kind of coach that you wanted to play for or your kids to play for.

But he touched on many different topics such as the Colts (of course), his relationship with current and former players, his book…a very basic interview. Then Rome asked him about Dononvan McNabb’s comments during an HBO interview about black quarterbacks being scrutinized harder than white quarterbacks (McNabb’s comments taken from Bloomberg article):

“There are not that many African-American quarterbacks, so we have to do a little bit extra,’…
(About white Quarterbacks Payton Manning and Carson Palmer)“Let me start by saying, I love those guys. But they don’t get criticized as much as we do. They don’t,”

I have had mixed emotions about those comments because all NFL players are heavily scrutinized (except Brett Favre for some reason) and it is a win only mentality from fans, owners, and the media. Also, there are so many black QB’s that it isn’t as big a deal as say 25 or 30 years ago. Tony Dungy’s comments in the interview seemed to make the same connection that everyone in the league is under tremendous amounts of pressure and similar scrutiny.

But, without being asked by Jim Rome, he brought up Ty Willingham and how Notre Dame got rid of him after 3 seasons and now you have Charlie Weis, in his third year, having the worst season in Notre Dame history at 1-6. Willingham was fired after seasons of 10-3, 5-7, and 6-6…which besides his first year is nothing great. The problem was that he was fired after only 3 years. This is almost unheard of in college football.

If we went back in the time machine to 2004/2005, actually just google ‘Ty Willingham Notre Dame Fired’ and you can see a bunch of articles, you would read articles talking about how he was fired for being a bad coach and blowout losses. “It has noting to do with him being black it is about him as a coach”…”He is taking ND in the wrong direction”. So were is the outcry for Charlie Weis’ head?

In most situations the truth is somewhere in the middle. Did Ty Willingham being fired have something to do with him being black? I don’t know, but it is hard to say no. Did it have to do with Urban Meyer? I think Notre Dame thought they would land the current Florida coach but he passed on the job. In fact many coaches passed on the ND gig. Charlie Weis came out of nowhere to get the job with about as much college head coaching experience as me…NONE! You have a coach that seems out of his league, had a really good season with another coaches players, and the program sure doesn’t look like it is going in the right direction.

I liked what Dungy said about this whole situation during the interview (and I am paraphrasing because I don’t have a transcript)…”Everyone is waiting to see how Notre Dame is going to handle this. Maybe they learned from Ty Williingham?”. I say maybe they are just showing their true colors and will treat coaches differently because it sure feels like they are handling it a lot different than before. Too bad that is not a good thing.

Posted by kdub under Sports Related & Posts worth wasting 2 minutes on |