Can someone explain this?

[SMUguy]

When I was eating breakfast this morning, ESPN was showing its tape-delay of last night's SportsCenter, and running a ticker at the bottom of the screen. They wrote that Notre Dame coach Ty Willingham is going to be named national Coach of the Year.

He had a good year. He did not have a great year. He had a good win over what turned out to be a very good Maryland team. He beat a good Florida State team. He also barely scraped past Navy, got beaten at home by Boston College and got tattooed by USC.

How can Miami's Larry Coker and Ohio State's Jim Tressel NOT be the leading candidates for Coach of the Year? All Coker has done is win 34 games in a row, including last year's national championship game, and quite possibly this year's, too. Tressel took all of the players recruited by Mack Brown North (John Cooper) and actually won - every game. Their records are flawless.

The answer, of course, is obvious. Notre Dame always gets preferential treatment and plays by a different set of rules than the rest of the teams in the nation. Good at Notre Dame is viewed as great. Rules violations are treated as minor indescretions. They damn-near got an at-large BCS bowl bid. The best thing that could happen to college football would be if the NCAA would fall under the leadership of a Miami grad, or a USC grad, or anyone else (like me) who hates Notre Dame and all the pompous arrogance for which it stands.

Make the Irish play by the same rules as everyone else. There's no reason they should be on national TV every week, and there's no reason Willingham should be Coach of the Year. He had a good year, but there are a lot of coaches who had a good year. Some of the wins early in the season were the result of luck, officiating or maybe smoke and mirrors. Let's not annoint him as god just yet, simply because he coaches in front of Touchdown Jesus. He had better coaching performances at Stanford.

For my money, Coker is Coach of the Year.

[Jim Rome]

Same reason Notre Dame is going to the Gator Bowl and its $1.6 million payout instead of the West Virginia, which is getting $750,000 to play Virginia in some bowl nobody cares about. Notre Dame doesn't play on the same playing field everyone else does.

[Guest]

Is the whole world out to kiss Notre Dame's [deleted]? He's getting the award b/c of his success in his first season as coach. You have to give him credit for turning that team around if anything. I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that the african-american coaches union or whatever the hell they are, has been pushing for it.

[rogershealy]

how did bennett not get this award?

[PonyFan]

Willingham did a good job, and I guess he's a stand-up guy.

But if he's at any school other than Notre Dame, Jim Tressel or the coach at Iowa is accepting this award.

[Charleston Pony]

Like it or not, Notre Dame commands the treatment they get because they (arguably) have the largest national following of any school in the country. I know there are a lot of people who get tired of hearing this same old message from me, but the simple truth is that if SMU doesn't find a way to demonstrate we can attract more than 30,000 fans to watch our football team and 7.500 to watch basketball, we will never again get the recognition we long for. The game is now all about the $$ and nobody does it better than Notre Dame.

Having acknowledged why Notre Dame will always get preferential treatment, I do think Tressel at Ohio State is very deserving of this award, but there's no denying what a great job Willingham has done at ND. If you want to talk about coaches who far exceeded expectations, though, you have to look at Rich Rodriguez and the job he did at W.Virginia. The fact that they are even in position to complain they should be somewhere instead of Notre Dame is impressive to me. I also see what a void he left at Clemson, where he was Bowden's offensive coordinator last year.

[PerunaPunch]

Charleston Pony is 100% correct. While working on a graduate degree, my wife used to work at the travel agency that handled all the sports travel for ND, SMU and others.

The Notre Dame gig was especially lucrative because no matter where in the country their football team played, ND would have thousands of fans flying there. And for a bowl game, whew... 20,000+ fanatics willing to travel ANYWHERE!

Their superior attitude bugs the hell out of me, but candidly, it's probably just jealousy because I wish we had that same level of support from our fickle fans.

So why wouldn’t they get preferential treatment for bowls? It’s all about money, and believe me, those bowl officials want to sell tickets. ND, probably more than any other program in the country can sell tickets anywhere because their large fan base is willing and able to travel.

[Lefty]

Good call, Charleston. Rodriguez has done an outstanding job with the Mountaineers. That's a tough place to recruit, and he's put together a very good squad.

[Nacho]

I like ND and I'm not even Catholic (the Methodists have their hands full with me). They are America's college football team. Like the Dallas Cowboys you either love 'em or hate 'em. In the next couple of years ND will be National Champs again. Why do you think practically every high school in the country plays the ND fight song? Greatness, that's why.

[Mustangs35SMU]

My Highschool Plays their fight song to .::Longview High School::. thats one main reason I like ND

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Home of the 1935 Nation Champions! the SMU Mustangs!

[Charleston Pony]

On the subject of how important fan support is in today's college football world, our local sports talk radio was bashing Clemson today and calling it an "embarrassment" that they have only sold 5,000 tickets for the Tangerine Bowl (they've only been on sale for a week and the game is played on 12/23!). Would SMU bring more than 5,000 fans to any bowl other than the Cotton Bowl??? In addition to recruiting better players, we desperately need to figure out a way to build a fan base that will help SMU be recognized in the world of college football.

[RI Stang]

This morning's paper said that Texas Tech has sold less than 1,000. It's likely that Tech will have to shell out around $450,000 of their own cash to cover their allotment. Quite sad.

[Casey]

Best ways to build Charleston's proposed fan base:
1. Win
2. Recruit local players

Take care of those, and Ford Stadium will be packed.

[Charleston Pony]

I will add one more thing to that list: price the product for what it is. In the days of Mustang Mania, Russ Potts had the formidable task of trying to pack texas Stadium and he did so by promoting/promoting/promoting...which included all kinds of "giveaways" and cheap ticket promos. I'd rather have another 20,000 people sitting in Ford who paid very little for their seats than have our guys continue playing in front of 20,000 or more empty seats.

Get them there 1st, then win and show them it's worth returning even when the cost increases. That was the Dallas Cowboys' model when they arrived in Big D. As a kid, I attended all the Cowboys' games because Dad could buy a $5 end zone seat and bring 5 school age kids free. I agree we should recruit more local kids and then offer promos in the schools.

[EastStang]

And when Potts was here our payroll for players was a lot higher. But seriously, I agree. We should have low cost family seating. We should donate a corner to youth groups, Boys and Girls clubs (you might even get a major sponsor to foot the bill). It might be a way to get larger crowds for the Nevada, SJS, Boise State games. I was talking to a TT grad the other night, and he was very happy that they were starting to play SMU and TCU again.