The wrong way to reach the right answer

Back when I was in high school math classes (and again in college physics), I used to get docked points on tests because I could do ridiculous things in my head and didn't bother to show my work. I thought that was a stupid penalty -- why take time to write down numbers I don't need to write down when that time could be used to think about the few problems I actually had to think about?

And it's not like there was any dispute about whether I could do the work; I breezed through the highest math class my school offered with a final grade of 106 percent (no joke). The only concern -- at least the way it was told to me -- was that there was no way to know if I was reaching the solution "the right way."

. . . . .

At some point soon -- probably today -- Bill Stewart will resign from or be fired by or "part ways with" West Virginia, making way for Dana Holgorsen to take over as head coach. This should have happened six months ago.

Oliver Luck seems like a smart man -- he's in a powerful position, he has lots of money, his son goes to Stanford, etc. -- but I'm gonna have to assume that he sounds like Bill Lumbergh and that his incredibly awkward conversation with Stewart back in January went something like this:

"Hey Bill, so ... yeahhh ... I just wanted to let you know we're gonna have to go ahead and let you go next year ... until then, if you could just keep doing a swell job, that'd be greeaaaat. Oh, and by the way, I'm gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Saturday to help the new guy ... mmmkay? Greeaaaat."

Dana Holgorsen was hired to be the head coach at a time when a guy who had no say in his hiring was still the head coach and had no plans to leave voluntarily. Why did anyone (especially someone who makes six figures a year) think this would work?

It's thoroughly unsurprising (in a large-scale sense) that Bill Stewart has turned into a 16-year-old girl, Holgorsen has been doing his best Gary Moeller impression on a monthly basis and Luck has been left to clean up the very public, very embarrassing mess he made for himself.

When Holgorsen was hired on a coach-in-one-year deal and everyone was going "ummm WTF," Luck said this ...

"I didn't believe we had an opportunity to win a national championship with the direction of the program. At the end of the day, results matter. And we weren't getting the results."

... and then followed it up with this:

"We went on a great win streak, and I thought (Stewart) deserved the head coaching position for the 2011 season."

So do results matter, or did he deserve to keep his job? Those are mutually exclusive. No comprendo. He should have been fired or re-signed to a long-term deal; leaving him dangling from his noose while Holgorsen fiddled with the rope was the worst possible scenario for everyone.

The funny, bass-ackward thing about the whole situation is that everything will be resolved (messily resolved, but resolved) when Stewart gets his buyout, Holgorsen gets the job he wanted and Luck gets the coach in place that should have been all along.

But it'll be the stupidest, West Virginia-est coaching change in the history of coaching changes, and given the PR mess Holgorsen's already created for himself, Luck better hope for his own job's sake that the next few years are a lot closer to the Rich Rodriguez era than whatever the last few weeks have been.