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Strike Three for White, Athletic Staff
UHND.com - Alan Tieuli - Used courtesy of IrishEyes
12/14/2001
How could this happen?
Easy.
Kevin White and his entire Athletic Department
staff didn’t heed the warnings from two earlier, embarrassing incidents this past
football season, and now Notre Dame is a national laughingstock.
Bob Davie was shocked when he was informed by
White that he was being fired because the football program had “lost
credibility.”
If White continues down this path, he
may be on the other end of that conversation. And
soon.
This can easily be called
“strike three” in the 2001 football season, now clearly the most odious in Notre
Dame football history.
Excuse me if I’m not blown away
by this news that O'Leary lied on his biography and no-one at ND caught it. After all, the Irish administration has been
asleep at the switch the last three months when it comes to maintaining the image of the
football program.
There was the Michigan State home
football game on Sept. 22, the first contest at Notre Dame Stadium following the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks. The visiting Spartans were
standing proudly – and appropriately – on the sidelines for the National Anthem. The Irish were in their locker-room for, according
to Davie, “Logistical reasons.” It
turns out an agreement between White and Michigan State Athletic Director Clarence Underwood went awry, and White had his staff
spin out a press release at halftime to say that.
Guess what, Dr. White? This was your house. It was the responsibility of you and your staff to
make sure that everything went as planned.
Less than a month later came the Cooper Rego incident. Rego, a Davie recruit and former Notre Dame student, is now a reserve West Virginia tailback that was banned from the Notre Dame campus after being accused by a fellow student of sexual assault.
“At (the)
time of my transfer, Notre Dame barred me from returning to campus,” IrishEyes
reported Rego saying in October. “That ban, as Notre Dame representatives have
publicly admitted as recently as this week, did not encompass banning me if I were to
return with another team to play football.
“In fact,
when Notre Dame officials assisted my transfer to West Virginia, those two teams had
already entered into an agreement to play football this Saturday and my return was
anticipated by Notre Dame and West Virginia officials.”
Yet, Notre Dame
announced it would enforce the campus ban if Rego did appear in Notre Dame Stadium with
his Mountaineer teammates on Oct. 13. Rego
and West Virginia backed down, and Rego stayed home while the visitors lost the game.
We’re not
going to get into here whether that was the correct or incorrect decision, but one
question is still out there: Why didn’t White and his staff know about this ban and
take steps in pre-season, quietly, to enforce it?
Rego, through his attorney, composed
this thoughtful paragraph to sum up the situation.
“When a university as prestigious as Notre Dame loses sight of the values of honesty and fairness and decency towards all, and, instead, acts and reacts in response to its political antennae, we all lose,” Rego said. “I have lost this battle -- we all have lost, including, and perhaps especially, Notre Dame and its community.”
Are you still shocked about O’Leary?
White had to understand full well that his administration and his legacy, fairly or unfairly, would be measured in large part by his selection of this football coach. It absolutely behooved him – and his staff – then to make sure that O'Leary was purer than the driven snow. After all, this is Notre Dame, where a potential basketball coach in 1999 was turned away because he admitted he doesn't always wear socks to formal affairs.
White and O’Leary share some of the same collegiate lineage. White was the Athletic Director at the University of Maine. O’Leary claimed he played three years at the University of New Hampshire. Both schools compete in the same conferences in the major revenue sports. They are fierce rivals. This didn’t come up once in the conversations between the two men? If it did, and O’Leary lied to White, shame on him.
But blame here should equally go to Notre Dame. The people in charge of keeping the shine on the Dome in the Athletic Department are getting sloppier and sloppier. And, this time, the glare is going to be particularly uncomfortable.
“Credibility?” Bob Davie may be saying somewhere. “Who is lacking credibility now?”
This article used courtesy of Irisheyes. Click here for more of their articles.