General

Take Comfort West Virginia Fans: You Could Always Have Greg Robinson as Your Coach

Sep 19, 2008, 4:30 PM UTC

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â†µBill Stewart might be a lot of things: a genuinely nice guy, benign, a credit to his community, and well-liked by everyone he works with at West Virginia. He also might be a skilled artist, particularly when it comes to working with pastels, and an amateur pilot with a knack for landing planes in conditions in which other pilots wouldn’t dream of touching down. He may even be West Virginia’s best neurosurgeon.â†µâ†µWhat he is not is a proper head coach, judging from his team’s performances in its two losses to East Carolina and Colorado. The creeping, sickening feeling is familiar to anyone whose team has hired a coach who, just a few games into the season, began giving off mild to strong signals of a competence deficiency: blown clock management, relentlessly positive attitude despite mounting evidence to the contrary, and a startling ability to make the simplest parts of the game complex while over-simplifying the complex parts of the game.â†µ

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â†µFor a Florida fan, it's known as the Zook effect, the point at which your heretofore savvy football team under new management starts to allow fake field goals for touchdowns, miss simple kicks, suffer bizarre game-management decisions like going for two in the first quarter, and generally play without a sense of urgency or an apparent need to win. Obviously, since Zook’s been successful at Illinois, he has improved immensely, but many were there to suffer through the training-wheels days. Namely: me and every other Gator fan who had to endure the sight of Rex Grossman trying to run the option.â†µ

â†µâ†µLast night, West Virginia fans got that same feeling watching their team. Let me describe it for you: as you watched West Virginia’s offense sputter in the first quarter, you felt a mild unease in the stomach, like you’d just eaten a slightly sour burrito with extra spicy salsa. Then, the cold sweating started toward the end of the second, as Stewart called two timeouts to pin Colorado deep on a punt that the Buffaloes never took. Even a rookie coach should be able to deduce that once the clock has wound down to 3 seconds, a run play will take you to the break ... which is precisely what the Buffaloes did.â†µ

â†µâ†µThe most severe symptoms came in the fourth: heart palpitations, as Pat White and the offense ground down the field into Colorado territory with 51 seconds left; nausea, as Stewart let the clock wind down, effectively removing any chance of getting in range to kick a game-winning field goal. The final stages: numbness and fatigue, as the offense, tangled up on 3rd down again (the ‘Eers were a ghastly 3-13 on the night on 3rd down), watched their chances to win die with a doinked field-goal attempt in overtime.â†µ

â†µâ†µMy solution as a fan would be to apply the nearest alcohol directly to my liver, and that is undoubtedly what some West Virginians did. That won’t do as a long-term solution to whatever’s wrong with West Virginia. â†µ

â†µâ†µIt’s cheap to pin the whole thing on Stewart: the Mountaineers clearly lack a power runner like the departed Owen Schmidt for tough 3rd-and- shorts, situations they flubbed miserably on multiple occasions last night. (At one point on a 4th and 1, Pat White attempted a sneak that looked less like a proper, head-down sneak, and more like he was trying to walk fully upright behind the line for the first. It. Did. NOT. Work.) They haven’t sussed out what their passing game is going to be yet, and when the formation goes five-wide, the defense knows the QB draw is coming.â†µ

â†µâ†µDefensively, the ‘Eers let Cody Hawkins -- an erratic QB at the best of times -- carve large, tasty hunks out of them through the air in the first half. The run defense wasn’t much better, allowing 5’6” Rodney Stewart to run under their legs for 166 yards. At least East Carolina looked smooth and collected at all times; the new no-huddle Buffaloes had the look of a well-outfitted flag football team at times, unsure of where to line up and hurrying snaps as the play clock nearly expired. This was a potentially vulnerable offense with a quarterback who seems to enjoy donating fumbles to the other team, not a well-oiled points machine ready to fire.â†µ

â†µâ†µIt is not cheap to hold Stewart at least partially accountable, though, for West Virginia’s rudderless performance thus far in 2008. “We have a chance to have a tremendous year if we grow.” There’s Bill Stewart’s bromide for the night, and there will surely be more to come as West Virginia now looks to be sinking from the Rodriguez peak into a trough of mediocrity. Mediocrity isn’t awful; after all, the word itself means “average,” which, in the Big East, often gets you into a lower-tier bowl game. By evidence, Bill Stewart is a lousy clock manager who may be, at this point, judged a middling coach.â†µ(But a nice guy. Have to mention that: a sweet, sweet man -- one who does not understand timeouts and game strategy, but a nice, nice man.)â†µ

â†µâ†µTake comfort in one fact, WVU fans: you could always have Greg Robinson as your coach. Stewart is average to slightly below average based on the numbers thus far; Robinson is simply horrific, and there’s years of evidence to back up that claim. â†µ

â†µâ†µWill Stewart be given the time for West Virginia fans to make up their minds about him? Now that’s a question we have no data on whatsoever ... yet.â†µ

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This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.

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