Bill Stewart: History afficionado
December 3, 2009 by Mike Casazza
A friend texted me last night: “Ferdinand Foch is a beast!” I asked why, he explained, I did some research and I tend to agree. Sadly, this has nothing to do with Ferdinand Foch.
It is about history and it is about Bill Stewart and, specifically, how one affected the other.
Time and time again Stewart pulls quotes from the past and references battles and coaches and games and generals. It’s actually pretty neat and given his military background at Air Force, Navy and VMI it makes a lot of sense.
This season, though, he’s been able to point back to last season’s ECU game and the lesson learned and last season’s Colorado game and the turning point it presented. History served as a tool and the Mountaineers either learned from it or learned to avoid letting it repeat.
Now WVU is 8-3 and, perhaps unfathomably, positioned to make the Gator Bowl no matter what happens in either of Saturday’s top-shelf Big East games. I can’t believe the results in Pitt-Cincinnati and WVU-Rutgers won’t matter, but the closer I read and listen, the more that seems to be the case.
How did we arrive here? Well, history again guided Stewart and his team.
In the 13-9 loss to Pitt in 2007, then-West Virginia kicker Pat McAfee, now the punter with the Indianapolis Colts, missed two first-half field goals — from 20 yards and 32 yards — even though he had been named the Big East Conference special teams player of the week three times that season.
How much did McAfee’s failures in that game weigh into Stewart’s Friday night choices?
“Big time,” said Stewart, who was a special teams coach under then-head coach Rich Rodriguez in that 2007 loss to Pitt. “I told the team, before we went onto the field [Friday], we were not playing it close to the vest. We are bringing out the holsters and pulling both pistols at one time. … lightning would have had to hit me [to kick a field goal].
“I wanted our football team to say, ‘The old man is going for it; he’s going for the jugular.’ And, I wanted the Pitt defensive staff to know that they were playing a different opponent [than in 2007]. … When we missed those field goals two years ago, it just deflated us.”