Friday Night Fix: WVU’s Meltdown Completes; HBU Warms Up to Football

Mood Music: AC/DC, “Meltdown”

The weekend is here and so is summer (sorta). Temperatures sore across the nation, but nowhere was the heat as blistering on Friday as in Morgantown, West Virginia. Daytime soap opera-level drama followed a daytime soap opera style arc: begin Monday, pique through the week, wrap up on Friday. The Bill Stewart-Oliver Luck-Dana Holgorsen triangle got ugly quickly and proved definitively head coach is a job best left to one man.

Stewart suffered the summer’s first meltdown, which HailWV.com covered about as thoroughly as any outlet. Rather than link to individual stories, I suggest readers peruse the entire catalog of Hail WV entries from the week as there’s too much worthwhile stuff to point to just a few.

During election season in California, Senator Barbara Boxer ran a series of ads against opponent and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina featuring laid off HP employees. Among their tales of woe was having to train new hires from overseas call centers — the same hires who were brought aboard to replace the dismissed workers. Stewart, and really any head coach with a coach-in-waiting beneath him is in a similar position. Of course, Stewart went the absolutely indefensible route of combating his unenviable situation. But it’s not a position anyone should be placed in.

Included in that “anyone” is the successor. In Holgorsen’s case, he ascends to head a coaching staff constituted of half his own hires, and half Stewart staffers. The 2011 WVU roster has more than enough talent to dominate the Big East, and perhaps even push for a BCS championship. But there’s that old adage of the only thing beating a team is itself, and this situation is just such an ingredient. There might be less tension on the Mountaineer sidelines if it was populated with half-Pittsburgh coaches.

Additionally, Stewart’s attempted torpedoing of Holgorsen backfired tremendously, but left the new WVU head coach unfairly besmirched all the same. As late as this afternoon, the debunked six Holgorsen incidents were still being reported as fact at some outlets.

If you’re at home reading this tonight and not at a local drinking establishment, odds you have a kindred spirit in Holgorsen who I can’t imagine being any situations that can be exaggerated for a very long time.

Elsewhere, administrators have warmed up to football in the sport’s hotbed. Joseph Durate of The Houston Chronicle reported burgeoning Division I member Houston Baptistis adding football. HBU recently moved up to Division I athletics in other sports and is currently a member of the Great West Conference, though that is going kaput. The Southland with its deep Texas roots is the obvious choice for membership.

HBU’s plan to add football to its varsity athletic department differs from in-state counterpart UT San Antonio’s in that the Husky athletic department is focusing on becoming a Championship Subdivision program. UTSA’s intention from launch was to join the Bowl Subdivision, which a WAC invite sealed.

That said, if launch goes well, HBU would make an intriguing option for the WAC in a few years as part of a package with another fledgling program, Lamar. The Cardinals have been rumored in WAC discussions before. The state of Texas is an increasingly enticing target for the conference. It has already added UTSA and Texas State, with rumors of Lamar and Sam Houston State floated, though unsubstantiated.

FBS talk is a very premature though, as HBU will need the necessary two years to fill a staff, develop facilities and raise money — a LOT of money. From there, another few years in the Division I transitional phase await the program, which means any movement upward wouldn’t come until 2015 at the earliest. The BCS television contract is set to expire a year prior, which could render the FBS landscape completely unrecognizable from what it is today. T