| 22 May 2012
Like the rest of you, I was stunned- I mean, absolutely stunned- to hear the news of former West Virginia coach Bill Stewart’s passing yesterday afternoon. It was the kind of information you see come across the wire, look at, process, look at again and then double-check to see if somehow you’ve misread something.
Bill Stewart? The football coach? Is dead? No, it can’t be true.
Only it is, with the timing and circumstances the most shocking part of all. The guy was seemingly healthy (he was playing golf at the time of his heart attack), relatively young (at just 59) and was a part of our everyday lives as college football fans as recently as a year ago. He wasn’t some coaching legend dropping dead after years of retirement obscurity. This news didn’t come after a long battle with an incurable illness. This was Bill Stewart- the guy who drove us nuts as college football fans every Saturday as recently as two years ago- being taken from us far too soon. The news is as sad, as sad gets.
With the information now a few hours old, and folks starting to share their stories, most every Bill Stewart obituary starts off by talking about Bill Stewart the person, not the football coach. Ask anyone who knew Stewart, and they’ll tell you he was a good guy, no, a great guy, in a profession that’s filled with barely any of them. In an off-season where Bobby Petrino got fired for literally riding into the sunset with a woman who wasn’t his wife, the “worst” things Stewart was known for (mainly, boneheaded decisions on Saturdays) really seem kind of trivial, don’t they?
The stories of Stewart’s generosity were legendary, and my favorites usually came from the TV crews who covered West Virginia games. In a profession where everyone is supposed to be even-keeled and objective, every TV crew treated Stewart the way a teacher treats the student who sits in the front row and puts an apple on their desk every morning. They wanted to be critical of Bill Stewart, they wanted to be tough on him, they wanted to call him out for some things… but how could they? The man was just so darn nice! After a while, all West Virginia broadcasts began to sound the same, usually going a little something like… “Wow, curious decision by Bill Stewart to go for it on fourth down right there… by the way, did we mention Stewart’s wife gave us homemade cookies before our production meeting on Friday morning? Man were those delicious!”
And really, that was Stewart in a nutshell right there. He was more Mr. Rogers than Mr. Saban (who ironically, is also a West Virginia native), more like the uncle who pulls quarters out of your ears than head football coach at a major university.
Aside from being a “nice guy,” Stewart’s career at West Virginia was basically defined by two things, one really good, and one, really, really bad. First, the good, which was the shocking, stunning win he got as an interim coach in the 2008 Fiesta Bowl, a game that landed him the head coaching job, and in the end, ended up being the signature win of his time in Morgantown. If there’s one way to best describe “Bill Stewart the coach” that might be it right there: His biggest win was his first on the job. From a football standpoint, it was all downhill from there.
The second signature moment of his time in Morgantown was the equally shocking and stunning way with which he left the university. You all know the stories by now, so there’s no need to get too deep into them here, but they essentially boil down to Dana Holgorsen, a couple late nights in West Virginia casinos and allegations that Stewart tried to smear Holgorsen’s name in an ill-fated attempt to keep his job. How much of it is true, few (if anyone) other than Stewart knew at the time. None will know going forward.
Regardless, if you’re trying to pigeonhole Stewart’s career based on two, big-picture bullet point issues, don’t do it. You’re wrong. Instead, dig deeper. As the old saying goes, “the devil is in the details,” and in the case of Stewart’s coaching career, the “details” come in everything that happened between that epic night in Tempe, and his embarrassing resignation from the school. Some of it was good. A lot was bad. But most was more complicated than most understand.
Strictly from a coaching perspective, I think the best (and fairest) way to describe Stewart’s three years at the helm in Morgantown would be to say he “wasn’t good enough.” After all, it’s hard to call a guy who averaged nine wins per year “bad,” but calling him “elite” or even “good” (especially relative to what he inherited) wouldn’t be fair either. In essence, Stewart was given the keys to a Maserati, and while he didn’t crash it, he ran over enough potholes, curbs and errant squirrels to greatly diminish its value.
Looking at his coaching epitaph (an ironic term to use today), the 28 wins he got in three plus years at the school seem good, especially knowing there were two bowl game victories mixed in too. Then again, the sub context here is that those bowl games were second-tier, after disappointing regular seasons in which Stewart’s teams never seemed to fully reach their potential. Whether we want to admit it or not, outside of that Fiesta Bowl, Stewart’s losses stick out much more than the wins, with poor preparation, poor execution and poor decision-making overriding the fact that in any given year he was on the job, Stewart had the best team in his conference. Reflecting back, the idea that Stewart was never able to win a Big East title with the talent that he had (and that Rich Rodriguez left him) is simply mind-boggling, further muddied by the fact that those conference titles were there for the taking (as someone who watched every game of UConn’s 2010 Big East “championship” season, just trust me on that one).
It probably didn’t help Stewart’s legacy that his predecessor, Rodriguez, won the Big East right before skipping town, and that Holgorsen grabbed another right after Stewart was forced out. Simply put, there are some guys who are meant to be head coaches, and others who aren’t. Stewart was much more the latter than the former.
Then again, there is one part of Stewart’s legacy that no one is talking about, and that’s that from day one, hour one, minute one, he had a burden on his shoulders unlike anyone in college football. Bill Stewart didn’t just have to carry a football program, on his back, and it went beyond West Virginia University, and the state West Virginia itself. He was a man who had an entire conference’s livelihood resting on his frail shoulders too. That’s something Nick Saban, Urban Meyer and Chip Kelly have never had to say.
Look, I’m a Big East guy, and lived, game-by-game, play-by-play, through the Rich Rodriguez and Bill Stewart eras at West Virginia. And even I, as a writer, cannot fully explain exactly how important West Virginia’s program was to the sake of the entire conference. For West Virginia (and in turn Bill Stewart), it wasn’t “only” about being the flagship school in a state where the football stadium holds more people than any individual town does. This was about being the flagship football program in a conference without an identity.
And it’s that fact alone which made Stewart’s time in Morgantown so complex.
Yes, West Virginia fans expected him to win, but Syracuse, UConn and South Florida fans needed him to win too. At the end of the day, West Virginia was the only thing separating the Big East from the “big boy” table and total college football obscurity. Granted, Cincinnati did carry the conference for a few years under Brian Kelly, but at the same time everyone knew that- with all due respect to the Bearcats- it wasn’t going to last forever. Eventually, Kelly was going to move on, and Cincinnati simply didn’t have the resources to stay in the Top 10 nationally forever.
But West Virginia? Well, crap, that was a totally different ballgame. The Mountaineers were a football-first school, in a football-crazed state, where the state university was the biggest game in town. West Virginia? Those guys could compete nationally long-term, those guys could stay in the Top 10, those guys could play with anyone, if only they could get some good coaching on Saturday’s. Again, Syracuse, UConn and Rutgers were allowed to just be ok in any given year. For the sake of everyone, in the conference though, West Virginia had to be great. It was that nearly impossible burden that Stewart carried with him every day on the job.
And it’s because of that, that Stewart’s coaching career is tougher to quantify than it appears on paper. Yes, he was never able to take his team and program to the levels we all thought they should be at, but he was also given a job that he probably under qualified for, under expectations that were nearly impossible to appease. At about 100 of the other 120 schools in Division I college football, what Stewart did between the white lines would’ve been good enough. West Virginia just didn’t happen to be one of those schools.
Then again, let’s look at this big picture. Bill Stewart is no longer with us, and if the worst thing we can say about him in death is “he didn’t win enough football games” then what are we really talking about here?
As I said at the beginning, Bill Stewart was defined by a lot of things, yet incredibly, being a “football coach” wasn’t necessarily at the top of the list. Stewart was a family man before a football man, a friend before coach and a good guy before a good tactician. Sure it sucked for a lot of people in real-time, but in the big picture it really is a heck of a way to be remembered. The memories of wins and losses have already begun to fade. But the memory of how Bill Stewart treated people is only beginning.
RIP Coach Stewart.
You’re already missed.
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