As scheduled, veteran coach John L. Smith will bring a lower-level football team to a Utah campus this weekend.
The twist is that instead of leading Weber State against Utah, Smith will coach his first game for Fort Lewis College, meeting Southern Utah in Cedar City.
Having once gone from Utah State to the highest level of college football, Smith finds himself trying to revive a Division II program that lost all 10 games last season. How did this happen? It all starts with a motorcycle crash in Arkansas, an answer that requires some explanation.
The short version is Smith left Weber State in April 2012 without ever coaching a game, becoming the University of Arkansas’ interim coach. He hoped to pursue a national championship, keep the position permanently and solve the financial problems that led him to declare bankruptcy last September.
But the Razorbacks’ season became a disaster and Smith was out of work, leading him to a job with a $67,000 salary at Fort Lewis, a public liberal arts school of 3,800 students in the southwestern Colorado town of Durango.
