These days, college football has become a 365-day-a-year business. To do more than survive, to actually compete and win, coaches and players do not have the luxury of any extended time off. There's always more to do, always room for improvement.

And that's not it. Most big time teams can't afford to live in the present and focus on what's in front of them. Everything is geared toward the future, to next year, and the year after that and the year after that.

Schedules are made up years in advance, the best high school prospects start being recruited when they're 14 or 15. It's not enough just win the next game on the schedule, you have to win that one and make sure you'll be prepared to win the next 50.

The relentless grinding forward can keep a program chugging along successfully, but there comes a time when the brakes have to be pressed and the emphasis needs to be on the present and the present alone.

Every so often a program runs into a game where a win means so much more. It can mean validation or redemption or salvation or whatever. The point is, for the well being of the entire football program, there is nothing more important than winning that game.

Boston College knew it was facing that kind of game last Saturday. Tyrone Willingham and Notre Dame didn't. And they both lost.

When the Eagles took the field at home against Syracuse, they were 60 minutes away from a Big East championship in their final season in the conference and the promised land of a BCS bowl game. All the work the players had done since last season, all of the work head coach Tom O'Brien had done since he first saw his current players on a grainy high school game film, came down to this moment. And they blew it.

On Syracuse's opening drive, running back Damien Rhodes took a handoff 69 yards to the house. Game over, thanks, BC, for not showing up. The final was 43-17, but that didn't really matter. It could have been 3-0 or, say, 6-4, and the feeling for everyone connected to the Boston College football program would have been the same. So much hard work, so much preparation, a season's worth of effort and a conference championship and a trip to the Fiesta Bowl in sunny Tempe on the first day of 2005 turns into a post Christmas yawner in everyone's favorite winter getaway, Charlotte, N.C., home of the prestigious Continental Tire Bowl.

When Willingham led his Fighting Irish onto the field against Southern California at, appropriately enough, the Coliseum in Los Angeles, he probably had a pretty good idea that his team was being sent to the lions.

After all the Trojans weren't undefeated and ranked No. 1 for nothing. But I don't think he, or all but a few people, had any idea that it would be his last game at the Notre Dame helm.

It makes one wonder if things might have turned out differently last Saturday in a rare Southern California rain. What if Willingham knew that everything he had done in his career to that point was on the line? What if he knew the life he had built for himself in South Bend was riding on one game on the road against the most intense of rivals? How would his players have responded? Would he have coached the game any differently?

In the end it probably wouldn't have made a difference. USC could probably give the NFL's worst team, the 49ers, a good game. Any extra inspiration or motivation that would have been injected wouldn't have done one bit of good when it came time to tackle Reggie Bush in the open field. As is usually the case, the team with the better players won.

But that doesn't make it any less cruel. I'm not going to pretend to know what went through the head of Notre Dame's Athletic Director, Kevin White, as he watched the proceedings, but I'd be willing to bet that if the Irish had lost the game by 27-24 instead of 41-10, Willingham might still have a job today.

I am, on the other hand, going to speculate what the BC brass was thinking though as they watched their team get stomped. It was probably akin to that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning, think back to the previous night and remember how you blew a perfect opportunity with some hot chick.

What could have been turns into grim reality.

Two games, two teams, two losses, one very losing coach and a lot of hard work down the drain. It's enough to make you want to throw up.

Auburn, USC and Oklahoma, take note.