Saw this question about West Virginia football in Stewart Mandel's column on SI.com. I thought the situations were similar.
By the way, if you're a college football fan, his Q&A's are very entertaining.
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Stewart, why is everybody ignoring the Mountaineers again this year? If you look at their record over the past three years (not to mention the dismantling of the beloved Sooners in the Fiesta Bowl) they have one of the highest winning percentages in the nation. How long can you ignore that they are on their way to being a national title contender year in and year out?
-- Jared, Morgantown, W.Va.
Jared: Did you miss the news that the Mountaineers' coach left for Michigan and took nearly the whole staff with him? I can't imagine that you did seeing as it's been written about in the papers there nearly every single day for five months. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but West Virginia's run as a national power is likely down to its last days.
Sure, other successful programs have survived the loss of their architect just fine. Miami kept winning national titles long after Howard Schnellenberger put the Hurricanes on the map, starting with Jimmy Johnson. It took two tries, but Florida eventually found a worthy heir (Urban Meyer) to the legacy left by Steve Spurrier. And Les Miles has obviously kept the ball rolling at LSU since Nick Saban bolted.
But notice, all those schools went out and hired an experienced, sought-after head coach. West Virginia hired Bill Stewart. He seems like a good enough fellow, and he did lead the Mountaineers to that big win over Oklahoma (though with Rodriguez's now-departed offensive coordinator, Calvin Magee, calling the plays), but the chances of him maintaining the program's recent level of success are about as high as leaving a party at Lindsay Lohan's place with your fur coat in tact.
As I wrote at the time, Stewart's hiring was a foolishly impulsive decision made by an already suspect set of West Virginia administrators still high off the emotional Fiesta Bowl win just hours earlier. They took a now-nationally prominent program and put it in the hands of a guy whose only head coaching experience was a three-year, 8-25 stint at VMI that ended in his resignation over the use of a racial slur; and a guy who, of the nine assistants on West Virginia's staff, was the only one Rodriguez did not feel compelled to offer a job at Michigan. (As a result, the only remaining holdovers from Rodriguez's regime are Stewart and defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel.)
I'm sorry to say it, but this is not going to end well. Which brings us to this subject. ...
