By now you’ve heard that not only do some people think very little of Bill Stewart — one national writer called him the worst coach in the Big Eat — but that Stewart actually enjoys the otherwise alarming lack of faith.

However, with WVU finishing spring practice in Saturday’s Gold-Blue scrimmage here, the Mountaineer coach is in anything but a stew about this.

“That’s great,” a grinning Stewart said when told of the Big East ranking. “I love it. Fantastic. I live in the greatest country in the world, where everybody can have an opinion. I haven’t seen it; I don’t read it.

“I’ve been called a lot of things, a (house) painter, a fan. I’ve been called Gomer Pyle. It doesn’t bother me. To be brutally honest with you, I’m not real sharp on the computer.

“But unlike some other coach who says he never read the paper or got online – which is the biggest lie I’ve ever heard – I read the West Virginia guys. You guys at the Daily Mail, the Gazette, and the other West Virginia papers on the Web.”

It doesn’t sound like Stewart is going to be sucking up to the dot.com national scribes that fawned then and now over Rich Rodriguez and his move from WVU to Michigan.

“Why do I do that?” Stewart said of his home-based Internet reading. “Because I want to know what our guys are doing. I want a pulse on the state. I don’t care, anything outside this great state of ours, what anyone says. That’s all I’ll ever care about.

“Outside the friendly confines of our beautiful state of West Virginia, I could give a flyin’ doo-doo what any other outfit thinks of me.”

(Yes, flyin’ doo-doo. And I know what you’re thinking. The answer is no. No, Bill Stewart never worked with Jim Mora.) 

Stewart would enjoy CoachesHotSeat.com, home of the brilliant Hippopotamus Standards.

CHS ranks Stewart No. 58 on the proverbial hot seat and has a generally fair opinion of the Mountaineers coach. His 8-25 record at VMI is mentioned, but it’s put into proper context by also mentioning winning was rare before and after Stewart. Proper credit is given to Stewart’s predecessor for assembling talent, but confidence is put in Stewart to use that talent to go 10-2 this season. He’s classified as “Safe for Now” and the caveat is that Stewart will determine his own destiny.

There are several spots on the ’08 schedule where WVU could stumble, and it will be up to Stewart to make sure that his team is prepared to play every game.  Bill Stewart certainly (sic) is certainly going to both be a lot closer to and liked more by his players than was Rich Rodriguez.  This is not a popularity contest though, and Stewart’s main challenge going forward will to keep the WVU program playing at a very high level while Stewart put his imprint upon the Mountaineer program.  The bar is now set very high at WVU, and Bill Stewart must meet or exceed that bar or he will find himself in an early retirement.  In the moving (sic) Wall Street Bud Fox said, “Life all comes down to a few moments. This is one of them.”  Bill Stewart, this is YOUR moment.