MORGANTOWN — The last thing Bill Stewart wanted was his first crisis as West Virginia football coach to come before his first practice.

But trouble doesn’t wait, and less than 24 hours after the preacher side of him took over as he introduced his first recruiting class with a public dissertation on the value of character on a football, he was staring a crisis in the face.

On Tuesday night, three of his players — linebacker John Holmes, defensive lineman James Ingram and running back Ed Collington — were arrested by Mononghalia County police and charged with felony possession of marijuana with the intent to deliver.

Acting swiftly and decisively, Stewart didn’t go through any of the normal football coach charades. There was no “we’ll wait until the legal system plays out.” There was no attempt at a cover-up, no talk about these poor, underprivileged lost souls who were victimized by a broken family, products of wretched environment.

One sentence was all it took from Stewart to let the world know there’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s one who is going to see that his team is high not only in the AP rankings, but in the character and morality as well.

“These three players are dismissed from all aspects of the Mountaineer football family,” Stewart said in his announcement. “The players will maintain their scholarships through the end of the academic school year, pending the legal process.”

It was a brave move for Holmes was to be a starting linebacker on his first football team, Collington to be maybe the No. 1 backup at running back to Noel Devine, and Ingram a usable defensive lineman who would be in the mix, if not a starter.

“When I took this job, I said I would always do what is best for this team and this program,” Stewart said by phone late Thursday evening. “I never blinked, never hesitated, and I won’t in the future.”

As brave as it was, it was also the only road open to Stewart, whose “Signing Day Sermon” was based upon the importance of character.

Stewart began laying out his beliefs about having quality people in his program by recalling a conversation he had with coach Bobby Ross, who had taken over at Georgia Tech and recruited only 13 people in his first class.

Ross explained to Stewart that the worst thing he could have done was recruit a player for the sake of recruiting him, without investigating their character and moral fiber.

Stewart said that lesson stuck with him.

He then went on to show how he followed that lesson with his first recruiting class.

“The worst thing we could have done as a staff is just sign a player. They’re all quality young men. We talked to every mother, father and grandparent, went to the schools and found out about their character,” he said.

“As our governor told our football team, ‘The finest steel is made in the hottest fire.’ We want to know about character, about what’s inside.”

Stewart followed that up by expressing how much pride he had in his team’s performance in Arizona at the Fiesta Bowl — not only on the field, but off it.

“We were in the desert, had casinos over here, dance halls over there. Pockets full of money,” Stewart said. “We had 125 young men. Eight days, seven nights — one curfew bust.

“Coaching did not win the Fiesta Bowl. Chemistry, teammates, character, doing things the right way, being accountable, being responsible. That’s the reason we won the Fiesta Bowl.”

The approach Stewart takes is as refreshing as it is counter mainstream thinking in the cut-throat, competitive world of college football, where the better you are, the more you can get away with.

It certainly is a departure from the Rich Rodriguez approach, which seemed was as unsatisfactory as Stewart’s is satisfactory.

If Rodriguez’s actions in his defection to Michigan surprised you, chances are you weren’t around to see the way he handled Adam “Pacman” Jones and Chris Henry.

Jones pleaded guilty as a sophomore in 2003 to a misdemeanor battery charge that grew out of a bar fight on the night his first camp broke, admitting to hitting a WVU student in the face with a pool cue. The charge originally was a felony, but was reduced to a misdemeanor in a plea bargain.

Jones wound up under home arrest and received a year’s probation from the court, but was never suspended by Rodriguez.

Henry was disciplined three times during his final season, 2004, missing a game and a half. Among his indiscretions was an obscene gesture at Rutgers fans.

Both players said thank you to Rodriguez for not canning them by leaving a year early for the NFL, where they became the poster children for out-of-control players, while most people felt their lack of character and discipline, along with a me-first attitude, destroyed the team.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at behertzel@hotmail.com.