At West Virginia, Innuendo and a Football Coach’s Exit

On a lazy weekday afternoon, storm clouds gathered as the future of the West Virginia football coach Bill Stewart became hazier. Inside Mario’s Fishbowl Bar and Grill, a hangout popular with the campus crowd, the beer was cold and the conversation, like the signature chicken wings, had a kick to it.

“I don’t think Stewart’s going to be walking out on Mountaineer Field on opening day,” one customer, Jeff Drost, said as Jeremy Milam, a friend and W.V.U. graduate, stood nearby and nodded in agreement.

Drost was speaking before Stewart’s resignation was made official Friday night. Stewart had been set to mentor his successor, the offensive coordinator Dana Holgorsen, during the 2011 season and then be reassigned within the athletic department.

In a spring in which U.S.C. was stripped of its 2004 national championship and Ohio State’s Jim Tressel resigned under pressure amid mounting evidence that his players received improper benefits, the soap opera playing out here — perhaps as bizarre as any in college sports — didn’t move the shock needle outside West Virginia.

It seemed like a shaky plan from the start, a proud lion like Stewart nurturing a cub with no blood ties that was dropped into his den. Perhaps predictably, it all began to fall apart this week when a former beat reporter who covered the Mountaineers revealed that he and another reporter had been encouraged by Stewart in separate phone calls in December to dig up some “dirt” on Holgorsen.

The reporter, Colin Dunlap, dismissed the conversation as the doings of a desperate man. But the idea that somebody might be trying to undermine Holgorsen’s reputation has been given greater force by the publication on May 28 of an anonymously sourced column in The Huntington Herald-Dispatch that described several alcohol-related incidents involving Holgorsen.

Only one has been substantiated. Last month, Holgorsen was escorted from a West Virginia casino by police. No charges were filed, but Holgorsen acknowledged having acted inappropriately and issued a statement saying he had learned a “valuable lesson.”

Cohesion is paramount in football. Coaches make team-bonding exercises a regular part of their regimens. So as the notion that Stewart or someone close to him was running a smear campaign against Holgorsen gained traction, Mountaineers fans were not sure what to think. They seemed certain of only this: in college sports today, no possibility, however unseemly, could be discounted.

“It’s become a corrupt entity,” Drost said.

Among the West Virginia fans who wanted to see Stewart gone, their reasons seemed to have less to do with any moral failings than the failure of his offense. West Virginia averaged 372.7 yards in total offense in 2010 en route to its third consecutive nine-win season under Stewart. The Oklahoma State offense last year under Holgorsen, the offensive coordinator, averaged 538 yards.

“Out with the old, in with the new,” Brad Brown, a 2008 graduate of West Virginia, said. “We had no offense under Stewart. It was terrible. Holgorsen’s an up-and-comer. He’s had outstanding offenses everywhere he’s been.”

Brown said he wasn’t concerned about Holgorsen’s ability to guide young men down the path to maturity in the wake of his alcohol-fueled night at the casino.

“Who cares?” he said. “He’s being paid to win games.”

Stewart, who turns 59 on Saturday, led the Mountaineers to a 9-4 record and a share of the Big East title in 2010. He is a West Virginia native who has described coaching the Mountaineers as his dream job.

He took over the program on a temporary basis before the 2007 postseason, after Rich Rodriguez accepted the head coaching job at Michigan. Upon leading the Mountaineers to a victory against Oklahoma in the 2008 Fiesta Bowl, Stewart was handed the reins of the program.

Oliver Luck, a former star quarterback at W.V.U., took over as the athletic director last year. At the time of Holgorsen’s hiring, Luck said he didn’t believe the Mountaineers could win a national championship under Stewart. Rather than buy out Stewart’s contract at a cost of nearly $2 million, Luck settled on having Stewart remain for one more season and mentor Holgorsen.

Even those who find fault with Stewart’s coaching regard him favorably as a person, describing him as a good, God-fearing man. Dunlap, who covered the Mountaineers for The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette until leaving the paper this year, said he dismissed Stewart’s request to dig up dirt on Holgorsen because it was so out of character for him.

“I totally understand the journalism old guard who says you should have hung up and called your editor, you should have hung up and called Oliver Luck,” Dunlap said Friday by telephone. “I passed it off because I saw it as far removed from his character.”

Dunlap is working part time for the Pittsburgh radio station KDKA-FM.

As the rumors grew that Stewart or someone in Stewart’s inner circle was leaking disparaging information about Holgorsen, Dunlap appeared as a guest on a show on the station and was asked by the host if he could imagine Stewart behaving in such a manner. Dunlap said he replied that he could and recounted his December telephone conversation with Stewart.

Dunlap said he has spoken with Luck this week and takes no joy in seeing Stewart’s graceless ride into the sunset.

The idea of having a lame-duck coach lead the Mountaineers anywhere was being roundly second-guessed, including by Luck, who appeared on KDKA-FM earlier in the week.

Asked if he would champion the arrangement if he had it all to do over, he said, “I don’t know.”

The West Virginia players have been caught in the middle of the tempest. “It’s unfortunate,” the senior defensive end Bruce Irvin told reporters on Tuesday. “You never want this type of publicity around your program. But we’re not going to let it bother us. We’ve still got a goal, and that’s to win the Big East.”

The walls and ceiling of Mario’s are papered with proclamations from customers of big successes — of beers consumed in record time or in record numbers.

One piece of paper, dated March 31 of this year, made it known that Holgorsen had consumed his first beer in the goblets big and deep enough to fit softballs. “The first of many,” it read.


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