Lou Holtz might be one of the best road coaches of all time. Of course, it's a little hard to wrestle that title away from Rockne whose 1929 team played 9 games in the space of 56 days (more than one per week, obviously), won them all, won the national championship -- and all 9 games were road games, including a legendary 7-0 season-ending victory over Army in New York. (Notre Dame stadium was being built in 1929). But I digress.
If you look at Holtz's last 5 years with N.D. he was 23-7-1 in home games, 17-4-1 in road games and 4-2 in neutral site games (bowl games and non-N.D. Navy games). Thus he was .758 at home, .795 on the road, and .667 in neutral site games. His road and neutral record of 21-6-1 (.768) is, for practical purposes, equal to his home record.

Davie was 24-7 at home, 9-15 in road games and 2-3 in neutral site games (2 wins over Navy and the three bowl losses). The nearly unbelievable aspect of this (at least to me) is that Davie's teams were actually slightly better than Holtz's teams (in record anyway) at home for the compared 5-year intervals (there is no question that Holtz played harder schedules and Davie never equaled anything like Holtz's 1993 win over F.S.U.) So while Davie was .774 at home, he was a very poor .375 on the road.

Willingham, though no Holtz at this point, was able to get his teams to ready to play on the road. Willingham's home record was 25-16-1 (.607), his road record 18-17 (.514) and his neutral site record 1-3 (.250).

If the gap (or lack of it in Holtz's case) between home and road performance does not reflect coaching, then what can it reflect? Davie, in fact, got worse in terms of road performance over time. After two years he was 5-5 on the road but then was 4-10 his last three years. The 1999 team was 0-5 and the 2001 team was 1-4.

Moreover, Davie was essentially unable to beat good teams on the road. Of his nine victories on the road, only four were against teams that finished the season at .500 or better, and two of these were teams that finished at exactly .500 (Purdue 2001 and Pitt in 1997). The two that finished with winning records were L.S.U. in (9-3 in 1997 (though the Tigers evened the score by winning the bowl game) and West Virginia (7-5 in 2000). In a sense, Davie's most crucial road win was at U.S.C. in 2000, but recall that U.S.C. was in disarray and finished 5-7 with the firing of Hackett an open secret by then.

Of Willingham's 18 wins, 9 came against teams that were .500 or better, and Willingham did have some fairly big road wins, including handing Oregon its only loss of the season in 2001 and breaking the Ducks' home winning streak and beating Arizona early in the season in 1999, as the Cats were coming off a 12-1 record in 1998 that included a bowl win over Nebraska. He also beat U.S.C. on the road twice (in 1999 and 2001) and U.C.L.A. once. While Willingham's 1-3 bowl record is certainly not great, it does include a 38-0 thrashing of M.S.U. and a spunky 17-9 Rose Bowl loss to Wisconsin where Stanford was seriously undermanned, particularly with three of its best players injured.

Suppose, for a moment, that Davie had been able to equal Willingham's relatively small "gap" between home and road of .093, instead of the .399 gap that he actually acheived. Recall that Davie was .774 at home. A .093 gap would have made him a respectable .681 on the road and would have given him an overall win rate of roughly .728 (Holtz was .765 and Devine .764). Instead of being 35-25 for his five years, Davie would've been roughly 44-16.

The fact that N.D. managed a decent home record under Davie simply must reflect a reasonable level of talent on the team, unless one thinks that Davie was actually doing a good coaching job at home, which seems quite counter to experience. The fact that N.D. played so poorly on the road (and so consistently poorly) must be put down to the coaching staff's inability to properly prepare for road games. I am hard pressed to come up with any other explanation for a nearly .400 gap between the team's home and road performances.