Irish Give Willingham the Bums' Rush

Just this Saturday I was telling my brother that one Notre Dame football's big problems was that as long as Tyrone Willingham continued to produce at least mediocre results - winning seasons, minor bowl games, the occasional upset of a big-time program - the school couldn't fire him. My reasoning was that since Willingham is an African-American, and it would be a horrible PR move to fire an African-American head coach unless he'd shown himself to be genuinely incompetent, and Notre Dame is a school that gets by almost exclusively on its reputation at this point, the school (which after all hasn't been a big-time program for about a decade) would rather go through ten more seasons of mediocrity than endure the firestorm that would come from firing the guy. Shows what I know. I guess maybe it's a victory for color-blindness in the country: we live in an age where we judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by his position in the BCS standings.