Bill Stewart gets a lot of grief for the sometimes meandering manner of his press conferences. Sometimes we get confused trying to follow along and sort sense from nonsense. Quite often, there’s a good point lost in translation. 

Fortunately, there’s value in Decoding Bill Stewart. This week, WVU’s head coach is asked what his teams need to do better to win on the road. He details some of the details to his 7-8 road record and attempts to approximate the merit of road wins as they relate to a coach’s bottom line.

From Tuesday’s press conference:

Question: “Bill, you have to be spending a lot of time in your mind wondering why you haven’t had more success on the road. You know, you have a 7-8 record.¹ I know part of it is that a lot of your road games are against tougher teams.²

“I’m sure you’d like to be above .500 in road games. What do you think you have to do to turn 7-8 into 10-6, or 10- 5, if my math is right?”

Answer: “You won’t get to 10-5, Bob, when you have eight already in that column.³ I’d like to have had you as my algebra teacher. I don’t worry a lot about that. I worry about season’s end. I don’t like to lose. We lost.⁴

“Want me to go back to the first one, to East Carolina?⁵ I mean, we got whacked that day because we thought all we had to do was show up and play ball.⁶ Then we lost a tough one out at Colorado because we didn’t have any big backs, tight ends or fullbacks to get a first down⁷ and we couldn’t give them the ball, you know, with as hot as that quarterback was playing that night.⁸ That’s why we didn’t go to the two-minute drill at the end of the game⁹ and there’s various reasons why you lose.

“Is it easier to play at home?¹⁰ I don’t know. I guess it is, if that’s what the oddsmakers say. I really don’t know.¹¹ I don’t worry about that. All I worry about is at the end of the year what our record is — Have we done as well as we can do? — and go from there.

“I know this: We got beat 20-14 against the second-largest crowd in the history of West Virginia football. Is that not correct, for a road game?¹² The larger crowd, by about 1,000 people, I think, West Virginia got beat 51-6.¹³

“We expect to win every game right now. Every game. Every game.¹⁴ Home. Away. I don’t care. We’re at that point right now. That’s what I want to do. That’s who we are. That’s how I coach. That’s how I live. That’s how the staff is. That’s how the team is.^15″

And breathe. Let’s tiptoe through the footnotes:

1. Bill Stewart is 7-8 on the road, though with a disclaimer. One win is the Fiesta Bowl. Not saying he doesn’t deserve it, but he was the interim coach. Also, Stewart is 2-1 in bowls, which are neutral games. Take away those three, which were not true road games and Stewart is 5-7. Take away just the two bowl games in which he’s the full-time head coach and the record is 6-7. But when Bill Stewart has coached a WVU football team away from home, he’s 7-8.

2. Eh. If you count Oklahoma, yes, wonderful team. No. 3 in the country that night. Loaded roster and a coach with a bad bowl reputation. But in 2008, ECU beat Virginia Tech a week before beating WVU and then topped Tulane to move to 3-0. The Pirates lost the next three (Virginia included) and finished 9-5. Next was Colorado. The Buffs beat WVU to move to 3-0, then lost three in a row and finished 5-7. WVU beat UConn (best road win, by far) and Louisville (7-7 in the third quarter, won 35-21) and had a tremendous second half against UNC in the Tire Bowl, which was basically a road game.

Last year, the Mountaineers lost at Auburn after leading 14-0 and committed six turnovers. The Tigers started 5-0 and finished 8-5. Syracuse stunk, again, and WVU won 35-13. USF was in the middle of an annual tailspin, snapped a two-game losing streak by beating WVU and then lost to Rutgers. The Bulls also started 5-0 and finished 8-5. The Mountaineers played very well at Cincinnati, and Stewart hates that fumble/touchdown call, and were then underdogs at Rutgers, which was ranked the only time all season the week before. The bowl was again something of a road game in that it was set up for Florida State and Bobby Bowden, but the Seminoles were 6-6 and had one of the nation’s very worst defenses.

This year, WVU has played at Marshall and at LSU.

3. Bob Hertzel knows you can’t go from eight losses to five losses, but the question was meant to convey, “How could you be 10-5 instead of 7-8 through 15 road games?” Good little jab by Stewart, though.

4. Billy doesn’t like to lose because that affects the record at the end of the season … and he wants desperately to get at least 10 wins this season.

5. He’s going to go back to East Carolina: 24-3 in 2008.

6. From Sept. 8, 2009, a few days before WVU played host to the Pirates:  “I believe with every fiber of my body we thought we’d go out there, wear the old gold and blue and that’d be enough,” Stewart said. “We had Patrick (White), we had this, we had that, we had a big passing attack against Villanova and we thought we’d line up and go play and (White) was going to save the day. It didn’t work that way.”

 7. WVU was 3-for-12 on third down against Colorado and kept missing third-and-short. Probably as big a reason as any the Mountaineers lost that day.

They were at the Colorado 47 with a third-and-1 with 24 seconds to play. Noel Devine lost a yard and the Mountaineers sent the game to overtime.

Once there, they came up short again. On third-and-1 at the Colorado 11, White angrily called a timeout and barked at someone who was out of position.

“We had a misalignment and Pat saw it and burned the timeout so we could get it correct,” Mullen said.

The Mountaineers returned with tight end Tyler Urban lined up next to the right tackle, reserve offensive lineman Don Barclay lined up next to the left tackle and Will Johnson at fullback in front of Jock Sanders in an I-formation. Urban motioned left and Sanders followed Johnson as he attempted to go off tackle to the left side.

“We talked about that play-call earlier game and said the next third-and-short, we’ve got to use it,” Mullen said. “That’s our best play there.”

Sanders lost a yard.

8. That would be Cody Hawkins, who started out on fire and was 8-for-11 for 91 yards and two TDs on his first two drives. Then the defense dug in — and that was when a lot of the current players really came together — and shut Colorado down. The Buffs missed nine of their final 11 third downs in regulation and Hawkins went 14 for 22 for 88 yards and an interception after his first two drives.

9. I still buy Stewart’s explanation, but people still engage me in heated discussions about Stewart’s clock management that game: 

An offense that had a chance to win the game when it got the ball at its 20-yard line with 2:09 and two timeouts remaining netted just 32 yards. Things ended as time expired with a Hail Mary into the end zone and one timeout on the scoreboard.

In retrospect, would Stewart have handled things differently? Well, he was pretty clear in his reply.

“No,” he said. “No. I don’t second-guess. No. I don’t want anybody second-guessing me. No. We’re going to do what we do. Run. Try to kick the ball and win the ball game with a field goal. I absolutely wouldn’t change a thing.”

10. It is easier. How else was Rutgers, which had lost 14 straight to WVU and been 3-26 in the series since 1980, favored last season? Then again, WVU won. See what I did there? Anyhow, the general rule is three points.

11. He doesn’t care. Nor should he.

12. That  is correct. Of the 1,181 crowds to see a WVU football game, only one has been larger than the 92,575 Saturday in Death Valley.

13. Also true. In 1991, WVU played at Penn State for the final time and 96,445 at Beaver Stadium watched a 51-6 whitewash.

14. Every game? Every game.

15. Whether Stewart wins more on the road than he loses doesn’t matter to him — he wants to win far, far, far more than he loses. He wants to win every game wherever it is played. He believes every part of the machine functions the same way. If he’s to be judged in some W-L regard, he’d like to be held to the ultimate standard. Judge him on the team’s record after playing a bowl game.