What went wrong with UW football? Two key issues

Where do you begin? Where do you turn first to assess the decline of Washington football? What led to the utter systems failure we are witnessing?

A few weeks ago, the four-game stretch of Stanford, Arizona, Oregon State and Notre Dame was seen as a lifeline for the tenure of Tyrone Willingham. Now it's turned into a month of mockery, in which the Huskies get punked 48-14 at Arizona and every bye week becomes a likely spot for the inevitable fire-the-coach news conference.

When the season began, the thought here was that Willingham was dealt a ridiculously bad hand with the schedule. And he was. Then his team went out and seemingly proved in the past two games that the schedule didn't matter.

In a thousand words, we can't hope to find the little black box in this crash-and-burn. But here are two of the problems:

• Institutionally, the Huskies have an identity crisis. They can't seem to figure out who they are.

• Second, within the football program, Washington has failed Jake Locker miserably.

On the identity thing: Some around Washington are still so bewitched by the Don James glory years that they believe all the same rules apply. Of course, that was before Pete Carroll and Phil Knight.

Nowhere is that more evident than the way Washington has scheduled through the past 15 years of fits and starts. The Huskies have pretty much been scheduling as they always did, proudly, on their terms, foolishly conceding nothing to the realities of decline. They're like the diva in her 70s, still dressing as she did at half that age.

It's almost inconceivable that for several years on athletic director Barbara Hedges' watch, the Huskies were scheduled to play Oklahoma and Ohio State on back-to-back weekends in 2007. Somebody needed to tell boosters and fans this was no longer a program that should be doing that, if it ever was.

The Huskies cling stubbornly to the tradition that they've never played a team below Division I-A. Tell me what's worse, surrendering that distinction or watching an 0-5 team stumble listlessly to a finish line still two months away?

Todd Turner, ousted as athletic director late last year, made a succession of schedule moves trying to undo some of Hedges' handiwork, but conceded to me the other day that he didn't want to change some of the fundamentals.

"I just wasn't willing to break that tradition," he said. "When I walked in the door here, I knew Washington had a history of trying to play very good opponents. I liked that."

Last year, when it became apparent Washington wasn't going to make a third-year breakthrough under Willingham — and that year four in 2008 would be pivotal — I'd have been on the phone to everybody but Slippery Rock, trying to downgrade the Oklahoma-Brigham Young-Notre Dame nonleague gantlet.

"I certainly thought about it," said Turner, now with ISP Sports in Nashville. "But in all honesty, I could not go back to Joe Castiglione [Oklahoma AD] at the eleventh hour [and pull out] without getting him a different game. I just couldn't do that."

But the institutional pride explains only so much. I'd contend that it was the late months of 2005 — Willingham's first season here — that reveal a lot about his demise.

The Seattle dailies ran stories of Locker's commitment to the Huskies on Aug. 1, 2005. Willingham was about to launch his initial season at Washington, and he and his staff had a full six months before letters of intent would be signed in February 2006 to spread the word of the coming of one of the nation's most coveted quarterbacks.

Capitalizing on that momentum, riding the wave of Locker-generated interest in West Coast living rooms, selling a fine school in a great city ... the Huskies went out and finished 35th in 2006 recruiting, according to Scout.com — hard to do when you've locked up a premier player at the most important position on the field.

It can be argued that class has played below that rating. It yielded eight current starters, but with the possible exception of linebacker Donald Butler, not much in the way of difference-makers except for the injured Locker.

And that's the way it was on the field when Locker was healthy — Jake and a bunch of guys named Joe. That will be one of the main subtexts on the Willingham epitaph.

In a program succeeding, you'd envision that 2006 class to be a foundation — the fruits of a staff's first full year's recruiting, players in their third year physically maturing.

Instead, here's what Willingham's dwindling supporters cling to: We're so young. Yes, you're young, and you got that way by failing to establish a base of competent veterans.

Meanwhile, Turner offers a telling comment in the context of scheduling.

"Hindsight is real easy," he said. "If I'd known [the program] was going to be like it was, we'd have made a lot of changes.

"That was not where we were headed. Our goal was to win championships and compete at the highest level. You'd hope when the coach had been here four seasons, you'd be ready to play those teams."

Of course, they're not. Nor are they ready to play most other teams. And soon, there will be another new coach, and another new vision, and another stab at regaining lost glory at Washington.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com