SEATTLE — Mark Emmert needed a fall guy.
The University of Washington president wouldn’t or couldn’t get Tyrone Willingham.
Todd Turner was the next logical target.
In Emmert’s world, someone had to answer for the state of the football program. After all, Willingham’s 11-25 mark after three seasons, including a 4-9 record in 2007, has infinitely greater ramifications than an alum’s wounded pride.
There’s the matter of the much-needed renovation of Husky Stadium, an endeavor that could cost the university as much as $450 million.
The project was going nowhere, nearly four years after Turner first brought up the possibility and desire. The prospect of extracting major bucks from major donors who also happen to be wild followers of a losing football program, Emmert knows, was laughable, unless said football program experiences a reversal of fortune.
Thus, Turner’s thinly veiled firing, disguised as “a mutual decision.”
“There were some issues about fit and where the program was going overall,” Emmert said. “You look at this whole enterprise as a total and it was my conclusion that it was time to re-examine that overall fit. Todd didn’t disagree. I would describe this as amicable as these things could be. We concluded that it would be better to do this now rather than wait.”
OK, fine. Although Turner parroted Emmert’s claim of a mutual agreement, he left considerable doubt as to what was and what was not mutual.
“I’m really still trying to understand that,” Turner said. “I can’t pretend to know what the best fit is for the university.”
Mindful that happy boosters are generous boosters, Emmert needed to appease those prospective major fundraisers livid with last week’s decision to keep Willingham. Although we likely will never know every detail, Emmert has denied widespread reports that he met with the NAACP and the NCAA before retaining the head coach.
Conspiracy theorists maintain that the NCAA, rightly embarrassed that it had just five black head coaches among its 119 Division I teams in 2007, caught wind of UCLA’s intent to fire Karl Dorrell. If Washington showed Willingham the door, it cut the number of black head coaches to three, unacceptable even by the NCAA’s pre-Civil War standards.
It’s not beyond rational thought that Emmert wanted to return to the good graces of the mega-donors. If he couldn’t do it by jettisoning Willingham, he could by offing Turner, Willingham’s most prominent backer.
Suddenly, everybody’s happy. Or happier than they were.
Remember, Turner didn’t endear himself to the purple-and-gold masses with his stubborn support of Willingham. The former AD also didn’t win any points by calling Willingham supporters “Internet half-brains.” Many took a dim view of Turner’s view of the secondary importance of winning in relation to the satisfactory experience of the student-athlete. He even mentioned hated rival Oregon as a football program he wanted Washington to emulate.
To be fair, Turner succeeded in turning around the deteriorating culture of the athletic department. Nowhere is there any trace of Dr. Feelgood or leftovers from Rick Neuheisel’s monthly antics. The department is as clean as any in the country thanks mainly to Turner, a good and decent man.
“The entire athletic program was basically in a ditch four years ago,” Emmert said. “There were competitiveness problems, but there were also, and more importantly, huge problems with integrity questions and a lot of inappropriate behavior issues. The staff was terribly demoralized. We needed to get the athletic department out of that ditch, on the right road and headed in the right direction.
“Todd was really good at doing all those things. Those are the things that I asked him to do and he did them.”
But it wasn’t enough. Turner elevated the department to a higher level, but it will be up to someone else to take it where Emmert demands.
First on the docket is 87-year-old Husky Stadium, the seventh-oldest major college football facility in the nation. Metal sheeting covers rusted flooring in the south stands. In the student section, exposed rebar protrudes. Wiring in the press box is a building inspector’s nightmare. Restrooms belong in another century.
“It’s not falling down, but it needs improvements,” Turner said. “That takes time.”
As costly as the fixes are, they don’t compare to the proposed design changes: replacing the 40,000-seat lower bowl; ripping out the track; constructing a third deck to cover the new west end zone, which would move fans 86 feet closer to the field; and building a press box, weight room and coaches’ offices, to name a few.
The next athletic director’s job is to push the project through, with the understanding that it is so vast that it will have to be done incrementally — unless, that is, a sugar daddy appears with a check similar to what T. Boone Pickens gave to Oklahoma State ($110 million) and Phil Knight gave Oregon ($100 million).
At the same time, the football program must return to its former high prominence and profitability to help speed up the process.
Lotsa luck.
Sports columnist John Sleeper: sleeper@heraldnet.com. To reach Sleeper’s blog, go to www.heraldnet.com/danglingparticiples.
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