With the decade winding down, it’s time to recap the best and worst of the last ten years.  While there are going to be a lot of these lists, I’m trying to do it a little different here.  So to start off, here are my top fails of the decade.  Now I’m not just going to run off a bunch of bad teams and be done.  A bad team that we all expected to be bad is not news.  But those ventures which came in with fanfare, with hype, with real aspirations only to fall way, way short..that’s my definition of fail.  The things that were built up to the point where you wondered if the media were on that person’s payroll or if the management was on drugs, those are what qualify.  So here we go.

1. Charlie Weis, Notre Dame Football: Notre Dame throws Tyrone Willingham overboard after three seasons and before the end of his contract, which was unheard of for them.  They bring in Weis, then an assistant with the New England Patriots, to make things better. 

Weis comes in all full of swagger and overconfidence, stating that his players will have a strategic advantage over their opponents thanks to Weis superior offensive knowledge gained during his NFL years.  Weis does fairly well in his first two years, winning with the allegedly terrible recruits that Willingham had brought in and getting (undeserved) invites to two BCS bowls, which the Irish lose quite handily. 

Fearful that Weis may be trying to set up himself for an NFL gig, Notre Dame locks him up with a ten year extension.  Then, once he had to work with his own recruits, the bottom falls out.  Despite having highly rated recruiting classes, Weis fails to win anything significant from that point on.  He finally gets run after five seasons and a 35-27 record.  What’s really ironic is that his winning percentage is worse than the two guys who fired before him. 

Willingham finished with a .583 clip and Bob Davie, who preceded him, was .583; Weis’s mark was .565.  So for breaking Notre Dame tradition to get rid of Willingham and bring in Weis, they get two big losses in BCS bowls, back to back losses to Navy (which hadn’t happened in several decades), and one victory in a low level bowl game.  When the highlights of your tenure are two close defeats to USC, that should tell you something.  Namely, that you suck.

2.  Steve Spurrier as an NFL head coach: After flirting with numerous NFL gigs over the years, Spurrier finally bites and takes the money from Dan Snyder.  The ensuing two years are a comedy of errors and great soundbites, but few wins. 

Spurrier rounded up damn near available former player of his from Florida, thinking that they cold replicate his college offense at the NFL level.  A 7-9 initial campaign where the Skins started Shane Matthews, Danny Weurrfel, and rookie Patrick Ramsey at quarterback seemed like a decent start, at least record wise.  Then came year two.  Ramsey was the full time quarterback and got blasted on repeatedly behind ridiculous blocking schemes that depended on the likes of  5-foot-9 kick returner Chad Morton taking on All-Pro defensive end Simeon Rice. 

He was soon knocked out for the season, leaving the Skins with Tim Hasselback to run the offense.  They finished 5-11, while Spurrier was giving us oratorical gems like ‘Hindsight’s always 50/50’ and ‘We finished 5-11….not too good!’  Spurrier would soon phone in his resignation from the golf course; he had his fill of the pros and glad to get out of dodge and go back to college where he belongs.

3.  The ACC Football Expansion: Twelve team football conferences are all the rage; with twelve teams, you get to have a conference championship money grab game, and a firmed up case for a berth in the BCS title game.  So after watching the SEC go to twelve back in 1992 and the Big Eight become the Big Twelve almost ten years later, the ACC decided it was time to get big and go from nine teams to twelve.  At the time they only had one team that was a regular BCS threat, Florida State, and wanted more.  So an idea was hatched to get Miami, of a similar status as FSU, and Virginia Tech, a perennial Top 15 finisher to switch conferences, with Boston College as the third team needed to get to twelve. 

The obvious aim was to get a conference title game between Miami and FSU every year, with Virginia Tech squeezing in every now and then and Boston College providing strength of schedule points by providing an eight to nine win team to raise the overall winning percentage of the conference.  Well, things haven’t quite worked out so well.  Both Miami and FSU have declined since hitting their peaks in 2000-2002, and have been out of any meaningful title discussions, leaving programs fighting over the ACC title that have little to no national presence. 

The conference has routinely served up three or four loss championship teams to play in undeserved BCS games.  Meanwhile, the SEC/Big 12/USC three headed monster has dominated the BCS title scene since 2002.

4. The New York Knicks: Things looked promising at first.  An unexpected Finals appearance in 1999 was followed up by a conference finals exit in 2000.  Then it went bad.  Team President Scott Layden made a series of moves that have to be considered downright baffling.  He offered Allan Houston, a very good but not great shooting guard, a six year, $100 million deal despite the absence of any competitive bids from other teams. 

Then there were five and six year deals for Clarence Weatherspoon, Howard Eisley, and Luc Longley.  Yikes.  Then Isaiah Thomas took Layden’s place and doubled down on the crazy.  Fat contracts were handed out to Jerome James, Jared Jeffries, and Eddy Curry.  Trades for Steve Francis and Jalen Rose, which gave the Knicks four guys (including Stephon Marbury and Jamal Crawford) who were known for dribbling out the shot clock and hoisting up shots while playing minimal defense, and a deal for Zach Randolph, who did the same thing from the power forward position, followed.  The record continued to decline, and then Thomas finally got run.  If you want to take a Finals contender and turn it into crap, the Knicks in the 2000s provided the best example to date. 

This wasn’t an L.A. Clippers-esque salary dump just as the team was getting good; the GMs in New York were actually trying to win!  Nice job, fellas!

5. USA Men’s Tennis: We were fine until Sampras and Agassi retired.  Since then….not so much.  We had two guys, Andy Roddick and James Blake, who were supposed to pick up the torch and keep it moving.  Roddick, especially, was served up to us as the next big thing.  He got the commercials, the star treatment from the media, and the high profile girlfriends.  So far the Roddick/Blake duo combined to bring home….one Grand Slam title.  In nine years. 

Blake hasn’t even reached the  final of a Grand Slam even yet.  Neither of them are scrubs, but compared to Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, they come up way short.  And other than those two, US Men’s Tennis has….pretty much nothing.  It’s been a long decade, and unless something changes the next one may be just as bad.