ShareThisBy DAVE BOLING
Monday, November 20, 2006
Sometimes in this business it's necessary to make retractions or corrections.
For instance, when the University of Washington football team was 4-1 this fall, I looked ahead to a late-season game against Stanford and counted it as a certain win for the Huskies "unless the Cardinal decides to drop the sport before then," in which case it would go down as a forfeit.
I was wrong. Sorry.
After UW made an impressive comeback to defeat UCLA, I wrote that "it felt legitimate; it felt real." I thought it represented the long-awaited program revival.
Turns out it wasn't the revival. Sorry.
I considered the four early wins and "good" losses at USC and California as signs that coach Tyrone Willingham had the program back on its feet.
Sorry.
Saturday's 20-3 loss to previously winless Stanford, extending their losing streak to six games, effectively nullified those positive assessments. And if this season felt like anything, it was 2004.
Injuries, particularly to quarterback Isaiah Stanback and the top running backs, were plausible excuses for some of the losses along the way.
But the Stanford defeat? Nah. They weren't that hurt. That was the clincher. All that had been gained seemed relinquished.
The Huskies have the Apple Cup this week at Pullman, but I don't think that even an upset win over Washington State could do much to reverse the negative momentum of this losing streak.
So, as Willingham wraps up his second season, this slide makes it fair to question the progress of his regime and intensify the pressure to produce in his third season.
He acknowledged at his Monday press conference that the Huskies are not where he expected them to be at this point.
At the start of the season, four or five wins in 2006 might have seemed like laudable advancement. But not after the 4-1 start. Not after that loss to Stanford.
I heard somebody on the radio Monday say something to the effect that anybody involved in that loss didn't deserve to wear the team colors. Good grief, these are college kids.
Besides, this was more of a system failure. I can guarantee you that there were guys out there playing with broken bones, guys playing with concussions, guys spitting blood from getting hit in the mouth. To question the commitment of everybody involved in the program is an unwarranted insult to those players.
But where does that leave Willingham?
I haven't been very critical of Willingham or his close-to-the-vest approach, having talked to some coaches who knew him who convinced me that "he's all about the kids." They said he's dedicated to the players' welfare and to doing the right thing the right way. To me, that's more important than keeping practices open to the media or whatever might have been an irritant to some others.
But Willingham blundered before Saturday's game, inviting a few redshirt juniors to take part in the Senior Day introduction, effectively informing them that they would not be invited back next season.
Remember, this is while there are still two games to be played.
First, I'm stunned that Willingham, on his own, had time to think about who was going to be introduced for Senior Day. It seems that somebody had to put that in front of him.
Didn't this have to be the result of a misrouted memo from AD Dana Richardson saying it was OK to wager in basketball pools, and also to publicly announce that certain players were going to get their scholarships for next season yanked before this one is even over?
Willingham has reminded everyone that NCAA scholarships are renewable. And he went through his list of expectations for players, including behavior on the field, weight room, classroom, community, etc. By listing these, he implied that those who were not going to be renewed were guilty of at least one of these shortcomings.
The vagueness left them all indicted.
He apologized if his timing was off. It sure was. Everybody on the team now carries at least a kernel of doubt over his own future with the Huskies. How will he be treated before the fifth year?
"You never want to deprive a young man an opportunity to walk on the field a last time," Willingham explained of the Senior Day honor.
He was trying to be thoughtful?
In effect, Coach, these guys are being deprived of the opportunity to walk on that field a vast number of times next year. I'd wager they'd all swap Senior Day for greater sensitivity regarding their futures.
It's his prerogative to allocate the scholarships and establish his rules and expectations.
But his timing was terrible and his execution was worse, like just about everything else during the latter parts of a season that has deteriorated from promising to disappointing.
