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It certainly would be odd for White to have been told by his boss to extend Davie when a year later that same boss accepted White's recommendation to fire him.

When White arrived at ND, the Athletic department was a mess. There were a lot of poorly structured/worded contracts and very sloppy practices that were the result of being run by a guy who knew nothing about colleges athletics.

One of the 1st things White did was re-structure/re-write many of the head coaches contracts. One of the costs of that was having to extend Davie (he wasn't the only head coach to get his contract rewritten) because Davie wouldn't sign a new contract without an extension and White wasn't going to fire him at that point. The contract Davie signed actually made it easier/cheaper to fire him than his former contract.

While White isn't exactly a forward thinking/aggressive guy and didn't have a clue about hiring coaches, he did clean up many of the really bad practices inside the athletic department. It was particularly rife with a lot of nepotism as well as a nasty habit of recycling coaches into jobs they weren't qualified for. Quite a few guys ended up as an "Assistant Athletic Director" that was more a ceremonial role than functional. While some of that is typical of many academic institutions, it was particularly bad at ND, almost as if a sort of tenure existed inside the ND Athletic department.