“What is the role of a man who has strong spiritual convictions?” he says. “What rights does he have when he’s in secular company? Does he impose his faith? Those are tough questions. To have the balance to walk that straight and narrow path and not offend, it’s an imperfect science. You don’t want to impose your faith, but you don’t want to be ashamed of your faith, either. Jesus said, ‘If you’re ashamed of me, I’ll be ashamed of you.’ Just because you work for a state university, that doesn’t give you a free pass.”

The old coach is watching football on television. Sometimes he goes to games in person, like the evening before, when he went to cheer on the nearby high school team that his son coaches. Sometimes he catches the games from his living room recliner, like on this brilliant fall morning, when he’s picking through a chef’s salad and marveling as the Kansas State Wildcats roll up the score on the Texas Longhorns.

The old coach still carries on a running monologue when he watches football. He can’t help himself; he has to be careful at his son’s games to avoid yelling out loud, leading people to point up at him and say, Isn’t that … ? But now he points at another old coach on his screen, a snowy-haired wizard named Bill Snyder, who happens to be virtually the same age, and who happens to still be coaching college football.

“That’s amazing,” the old coach says, and I agree that, yes, it is, and then I ask him a question I’d already asked him the day before, but couldn’t help revisiting: I ask him whether he ever thinks of doing what Snyder did at Kansas State, whether, after retiring so suddenly and so prematurely, he ever feels a tug to return to the only profession he’d aspired to since the age of 7 (and reportedly aspired to again a few years back). I ask him, in so many words, if he ever wonders what his life might have been, or if he ever feels anything resembling regret for walking away from football coaching 20 years ago, in the prime of his career. And the coach replies exactly the same way he had the first time.

“Over-the-Hill Bill,” he says, jabbing a finger at his chest.

The old coach’s name is Bill McCartney, and he led the football team at the University of Colorado for 13 seasons, so I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that he seems to have sharpened his aphorisms to near perfection. “I can do an interview,” he says. “After a game, when the media fills the room, that’s my strength. Going and talking to the Buff Club, I could do that. The Bible says we all have unique spiritual gifts, and my spiritual gift is Romans 12:8. My gift is exhortation.”

The pithy little mottoes, the metaphoric anecdotes, the inspirational speeches: They come naturally to him, the way they flow off the tongues of preachers and pitchmen. They’ve become an organic part of his conversation, and they’ve carried him through the difficult and occasionally awkward discussions that attend the life of any man in his mid-seventies, particularly one whose professional and personal life were subject to such public scrutiny. “Over-the-Hill Bill” is McCartney’s way of saying, Any regrets I have are irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. “Over-the-Hill Bill” is one way of acknowledging that his life has ultimately always been in the hands of a higher power.

He’s 74 years old now, and he lives on a quiet cul-de-sac in a Denver suburb called Westminster. He’s a widower who seems to enjoy playing as much golf as he can, and so perhaps “Over-the-Hill Bill” is not an inaccurate characterization. But all those autumns ago, when McCartney first began heeding the pangs that would draw him away from football, he was 54, the same age Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops is now. His Buffaloes had won at least eight games in each of the previous six seasons, and had claimed a share of the national championship in 1990. His 1994 team was in the midst of putting up an 11-win season (including the Miracle at Michigan and a Fiesta Bowl victory), and his running back, Rashaan Salaam, was on his way to rushing for more than 2,000 yards and winning the Heisman Trophy. McCartney had already turned down one high-profile job, at Southern Methodist, and he surely would have been a candidate for other weighty jobs if he’d stuck around.

But the revelation came down, and McCartney heeded it.

Maybe, on the surface, the story of a man whose religious convictions intertwined with his relationship to football doesn’t sound particularly unique. Those two things have often merged, and in the modern era they often merge uncomfortably; there have always been (and still are) dozens of coaches who clung so deeply to their faith that it became part of their public identity, and therefore became a political flashpoint. But in the midst of the evangelical revival of the 1980s, in the wake of the Clinton-era surge of the religious right, McCartney became the first coach to so forcefully blur the line between preaching and football, stepping away from the sport he loved to help foment a religious movement.

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