Willingham, it must be remembered, came to Stanford as the head coach with experience only as a pro position coach on the offensive side of the ball. Thus, he probably was unusually dependent on his assistants, particularly early on in his career.

Over the course of his seven years at Stanford, Willingham's teams gave up an average of 27.4 points per game. The NCAA average is about 26.5 points per game, so allowing about a point more than that is certainly not spectacularly good.

The 27.4 points per game figure, however, is a bit misleading. The Pac-10 figure annually is about 29.5 points per game, and in conference games Willingham's teams gave up 28.8 points per game. Of course, the Pac-10 has a reputation for playing soft defense, and while this is certainly true of some teams in the conference, it has not been universally true. Consider, for instance, that the Colorado team that scored 62 on Nebraska and 39 on Texas only scored 16 against Oregon (which lost a 49-42 shootout with Stanford). The previous year's Pac-10 teams all looked good on the defensive side of the ball in big bowl games, including OSU's domination of N.D.

Part of the reason that Pac-10 games are higher scoring is that the league has usually had more passing teams, so more plays are run. This year, for instance, in the regular season N.D. (a heavily running team, obviously) ran 748 offensive plays and defended 690. Stanford (also over an 11-game regular season) ran 840 offensive plays and defended 775. Thus, Stanford's season was about 12% "longer" than N.D.'s. Assuming that this was representative of Pac-10 play it's not surprising that Pac 10 games involve about 10% more scoring.

If we look to Stanford's non-conference games, the picture starts to look a little better. In non-conference games, Stanford over Willingham's career gave up 24.3 points per game, a more respectable figure and more than 2 points below the national average. Moreover, Stanford's non-conference schedule has been unusually difficult. The only non-conference opponent that Stanford regularly plays that might fall into the "patsy" category is San Jose St., and over that period San Jose St. has had some decent teams (and none of them have approached, say, Navy's level of futility). Teams that Stanford has played out of conference on multiple occasions over this stretch include Wisconsin, Notre Dame, Texas and North Carolina. Collectively over this stretch Stanford's non-conference opponents had a quite good 157-114-1 (.579) record, which is statistically identical to Notre Dame's opponents' records this year of 69-51 (.575). So, Stanford's decent non-conference defensive performance was not gained against weak opposition. This year, for instance, Stanford gave up 22 points to Boston College, 14 to San Jose St., 13 to Notre Dame and 24 to Georgia Tech, each time holding that team well below its season scoring average.

Probably the most encouraging sign for N.D.'s future has been Stanford's performance since Baer was named defensive coordinator at the beginning of the 1999 season. Baer's naming as Willingham's defensive coordinator followed Willingham's worst year as head coach in 1998. His 1998 team was regularly torched defensively and finished 3-8, but the situation showed immediate improvement with Baer's hiring as defensive coordinator. After Baer's naming as DC, Stanford was a quite impressive 22-13 (N.D. under Davie was 19-16 against statistically similar opposition over the same period) and the Cardinal's defensive performance improved dramatically from the miserable 1998 season. One particularly impressive improvement in Stanford's defense has been its run defense, which this year allowed only 109 yards per game and 3.5 per carry.

There is nothing in Willingham's record yet to suggest that he is a great defensive coach. Then again, there was nothing in Ara's record at Northwestern that would suggest that he'd have teams at Notre Dame that would hold the opposition to less than 11 points per game over this career, but that's what happened. The evidence is that Baer is a quite capable coordinator and that he put Stanford's personnel to much better use than his predecessor. Given that Notre Dame was a reasonably good defensive team this year (about 20 points per game), this would suggest that the defensive talent level at N.D. is somewhat higher than it was at Stanford. If the preceding two propositions are true, then N.D. should be a good defensive team from the beginning of Willingham's career at N.D.