Bob Davie got five years. Gerry Faust got five years. The brother gets three. I’m adding racism to the list of reasons to hate Notre Dame. Tyrone Willingham was fired at Notre Dame yesterday, apparently because the AD and Board of Trustees have an erection for Utah head coach Urban Meyer, and thought this was their best chance to get him.

With every Notre Dame game I watched over the past three years, never once have I thought that the Irish had better talent than their results would indicate. In fact, judging by talent alone, Notre Dame won more games than they probably should have. Ty Willingham’s best chance to win was to get his players to play disciplined, fundamental football, with sound defense and special teams, while trying to avoid turnovers on offense. Most weeks, they did that… sometimes it was enough to get them a W, and sometimes, it wasn’t. But you can’t coach a 2-star player into a 5-star player, I don’t care if you’re Tyrone Willingham, Knute Rockne, or Touchdown Jesus.

Notre Dame, no matter the coach, is extremely unlikely to return to their days of national championship contention every year. You take a 5-star WR recruit and tell him, hey… you can party in Miami or Los Angeles and barely have to go to class, or you can go to fucking Indiana, which is awesome if you like cornfields and snow… and by the way, you’ll also have to carry some ungodly GPA. I know I’d be in LA.

If Notre Dame wants to get back to the BCS, there’s one quick and easy route there… join the Big East. If they were to do that, there would likely be one or two key games on their schedule every year that they’d have to win to get there, and that’s it. Until that happens, though, expect just more of the same from Notre Dame. They are no longer special.

The Butch Davis era, completely unremarkable in every way, is over in Cleveland. We’ll always have our memories of… of… I dunno. I can’t think of one single word to describe Butch Davis as the Browns head coach. Uninspiring, maybe. He was just kinda there.

The Browns were never good enough to be impressive, never played with enough passion to be considered truly threatening. But they were never bad enough to be completely discounted, either. I don’t recall Butch Davis ever getting really fired up, or being too passive. He’s not a genius tactician, but he’s not dumb, either. Never got the feeling that his players hated him, but never felt like they were in a hurry to bust their asses for him. He was just the guy on the sidelines in the Brown windbreaker. He never gave the Browns a personality, either in a good way or a bad way. Think about that division. The Steelers are the hard-working, blue collar team. The Ravens have an egomaniac as coach, an unbelievable defense, and you get the feeling that more than one of them as killed before. The Bengals, under Marvin Lewis, built a rep as a former loser who now can’t be overlooked. The Browns… eh, whatever.

So Butch and the Browns have parted ways. I’d expect to hear the name Kirk Ferentz sometime soon, and perhaps Charlie Weis, too. Terry Robiskie takes over as interim head coach.