He did lie. He did go somewhere. I speak for myself and nobody else – but your whole premise is a straw man, and an absurd one above and beyond even that. Nobody’s criticizing him for taking an upgrade in either pay or prestige (even if the prestige of ND is wholly manufactured at this point, as the “Irish legacy” people speak of is an old wive’s tale). We criticize *how* he went about it. The look on the Bearcats’ players’ faces; the things they said and didn’t say to the media; the way he showed up to the Senior Banquet flanked by police escort and left virtually immediately. I see how his team regards him, how they feel betrayed and lied to. You can make all the excuses in the world, but you don’t need to. You have him now. Nothing changes that. But it’s revisionist history to try to argue that he left the University of Cincinnati as a school, Cincinnati as a city, and his team as a coach on anything but lousy terms. And that’s, again, not because of what his decision was, but purely because he couldn’t have handled it any more poorly than he did.

You’ll see what I mean when he leaves the Irish to go coach in the NFL in a few years.