West Virginia governor has nothing better to worry about than getting Marshall’s coach fired

West Virginia governor Jim Justice is trying to get Marshall head football coach Doc Holliday fired and replaced by a former coach who’s one of the governor’s longtime friends, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reports.

Justice won the governorship last November, and the Gazette-Mail reports that one of his earliest orders of business was an attempt to sack Holliday, citing “a source familiar with the matter.”

Justice, a Democrat, “has sought” to replace Holliday with former Thundering Herd head coach Bob Pruett, the report says. Pruett coached the Herd from 1996 to 2004 and went 94-23.

The Gazette-Mail’s Jake Jarvis writes that Justice summoned Marshall’s university president for a meeting in December, when he was still governor-elect.

“It was not a meeting to say, ‘Fire the coach and hire Pruett,’” Justice’s chief of staff told the newspaper in a statement. “It was a meeting to say, ‘Ratchet up your game and do something to get yourself back to greatness.’”

The school president, Jerome Gilbert, said Justice merely “wanted to talk.”

“I probably shouldn’t comment on any of that,” Gilbert told the Gazette-Mail. “I want to maintain a good relationship with the governor, and it’s unfortunate that this information got out.”

Justice kept pressing at a meeting in March, the Gazette-Mail says:

Nearly three months after that meeting, on March 28, Justice summoned five members of the school’s board of governors to his office at the Capitol. Again, Justice reportedly asked the board members to get rid of Holliday.

Justice also asked the board members to fire Gilbert and Athletic Director Mike Hamrick, the man responsible for hiring Holliday, according to the Gazette-Mail’s source.

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“We talked about a number of issues,” [Marshall’s board chairman] said. “I don’t want to get into the specifics, you know, that were discussed. In general, though, we talked about higher education in West Virginia and our common goal and ideas for Marshall University and our programs.”

Nothing here sounds much like denial that Justice wants Holliday fired and replaced with Pruett. At the least, the governor appears unhappy with the program’s trajectory. Justice is a Marshall alum who’s donated millions of dollars to the university.

Marshall’s football team cratered to 3-9 last season, which was odd. The Herd had won at least 10 games in the previous three seasons, including a 13-1 mark in 2014. That team was the second-best in school history, probably, only behind the Chad Pennington-quarterbacked Herd that went undefeated in 1999.

It’s not unusual for politicians to meddle in football programs, especially at public universities that rely on state funding. Give Justice credit for his persistence, I guess.

Marshall is in Huntington, W.V. The Herd are the No. 2 program in the state, behind the flagship WVU Mountaineers. That program had its own salacious coaching drama in 2011, when now-head coach Dana Holgorsen was officially the school’s “coach in waiting” behind Bill Stewart.

After a Huntington paper reported on “as many as six alcohol-related incidents” in Holgorsen’s past, Stewart was accused of passing dirt on his eventual replacement to the reporter. Stewart had previously coached at Marshall.

Holliday is 53-37 in seven years on the job in Huntington. He’s the second-most successful coach in Herd history both by total wins and win percentage. The only coach ahead of him is Pruett, who’s 73 and hasn’t coached in nearly a decade.