The Notre Dame message boards are no longer discussing whether Tyrone Willingham should be fired. They’re already arguing about whether the next coach should be Barry Alvarez or Steve Spurrier.

The debate may be premature, but it’s probably not. A relationship between coach and college that once looked like a dream is rapidly turning into a nightmare. Like Gerry Faust, Willingham is a coach who is almost universally liked and admired. Like Gerry Faust, he’s a coach who hasn’t shown any sign of being able to get the job done.

This was to be the season that Willingham turned the corner with the nation’s most storied college football program. One week into it, Notre Dame Nation has already resigned itself to three more months of continuing depression. In the collective mind of the fans, Willingham is already fired.

A loss to BYU, a team that Notre Dame moved into the first week of its schedule so it would have some positive momentum going into Week 2 against Michigan, beat up a phlegmatic Notre Dame Team. The Fighting Irish, who have always been able to run the ball, amassed 24 yards on 16 rushing attempts. They made egregious blunders on special teams. They had no fire.

They stunk up the joint.

And now, the cry for Willingham’s scalp is fast becoming a howl.

It is not a happy situation for anyone. Willingham came to Notre Dame just two seasons ago, a dynamic and keenly intelligent man who had taken Stanford, a school with academic standards as lofty as Notre Dame’s, to the Rose Bowl. Some people made a lot out of the fact that Willingham is an African-American, even saying that the college and the man were both taking big risks.

What if he failed?

That’s always been one of the dumbest questions since, “Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?”

If he failed, he’d get fired, just like any other coach. It wouldn’t be a blot on his ethnic group anymore than Faust’s or Bob Davie’s failure was on theirs. Coaches get fired. Then they go somewhere else and try again. Or they become television analysts.

But when Willingham took over for Davie, it didn’t seem we’d ever be talking this way. The new coach won his first eight games, was celebrated near and far, and looked like the second coming of Ara Parseghian.

And then it went bad, and now it’s gone worse. And if it doesn’t get better – like this weekend when Michigan comes to town – it’s going to be over.

Since that 8-0 start, Notre Dame and Willingham are 7-11. Last year, the record was 5-7, the season beginning with an overtime win over Washington followed by a brutal 38-0 whipping by Michigan and ending with an embarrassing loss to Syracuse.        

In the offseason, all the talk surrounding the team was about how it had been tempered and hardened by what happened in 2003. The players did 38 reps of everything during their months of conditioning, the number welding into their neurons the score of last year’s Michigan game, the grueling reps guaranteeing that it wouldn’t happen again.

Before the first game, Willingham talked about “confidence and swagger.” That’s what the team needed to have, a belief in itself and its abilities.

“I’ve never seen very much, very many good things, accomplished by a lot of negative thoughts,” he said in his weekly press conference before BYU. “So I’d prefer to think positive and hopefully our guys have inherited that thought process.”

Maybe the problem is in that word, “hopefully.” Maybe it’s that Willingham is not a screamer and a martinet in practice, but a more cerebral and intellectual man, a man of big thoughts when what is needed are big kicks in big posteriors.

Notre Dame senior tailback Ryan Grant was out of action with a sore hamstring, but when you generate just 24 yards on the ground in 16 tries, Jim Brown wouldn’t have helped. And a rushing game is a matter of sheer will more than anything –- the same as stopping one. The Irish  didn’t have the will on the offensive line. Because it didn’t, it didn’t have a chance on the scoreboard.

Afterwards, Willingham said that his team wasn’t prepared for the defenses BYU brought. That’s possible, but good coaching staffs and good teams adjust to the unexpected. Notre Dame didn’t.

And then there were the mistakes on special teams. Punt returner Rhema McKnight fielded one ball on his one-yard line. That’s as fundamental as error as a hitter in baseball popping up on a pitch a foot out of the strike zone with a 3-0 count. It’s unforgivable.

But when players do things like that, it’s an indication that someone didn’t do a good job of hammering home technique. And when McKnight made a fundamental error on the next punt, it’s proof.

Much has been made of Notre Dame’s academic standards and how they limit the talent pool the school can pursue. But that’s a cop-out. There are superior players with superior brains out there. Willingham found them when he was at Stanford. For some reason, he has yet to find them at Notre Dame.

And the ones he’s found haven’t responded to him. They made egregious errors. They played flat. They showed no improvement over last year.

So now Michigan, Notre Dame’s original rival, is coming to South Bend. It brings with it the best lifetime winning percentage in college football, having passed Notre Dame by a tenth of a percentage point, .746 to .745 when the Irish gagged in Provo.

This is the game Notre Dame has been working for since January. It’s possible — although unfathomable — that they were so eager to get back at Michigan, they overlooked BYU, one of the five teams Notre Dame beat last year. It’s possible that, with Grant back, they will be able to run the ball. It’s possible they will play with fire and passion and precision. It’s possible that they won’t make dumb mistakes.

If they do all of those things and win, the heat will subside somewhat. If they lose, it will only get worse. And if they keep losing, Willingham will likely be gone at season’s  end.

If he’s not gone already.

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