By the time Walt Harris left Stanford, he had suffered through all the torments of every level of hell. He lost Mark Bradford, Nick Frank and the long-suffering Trent Edwards to injury. The stands were emptier than ever. Back in September, he bragged that the team’s motto was: “They Said It Couldn’t Be Done.” They were right. Eleven losses later, fan sentiment was at a nihilistic low — most students, gone sadistic from hopelessness, were pulling for a “perfect season” of 12 losses. Then we beat Washington. Walt couldn’t even lose right.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Two years ago, Buddy Teevens finished off his three-year coaching stint quagmired in mediocrity. Teevens was a lovely fella, well-liked by the players. He was a nice guy, perhaps too nice. His door was always open. His name was Buddy. But football coaches should be respected, and feared. Buddy lacked the killer’s instinct.

So, Walt Harris. Cynics hooted that, like Teevens before him, Walt was a close friend and butt-buddy of then-Athletic Director Ted Leland. But Harris rescued Pitt’s football program, going to six bowl games and making them a serious Big East competitor. He was going to Change Shit Up. He had the team run crack-of-dawn suicide jogs in the winter. He had a terse style, a take-no-prisoners attitude. No more Buddy Ball. No more stammering O-Line. No more running up the middle. Trent Edwards shall not be knocked out twice before halftime. We will make the Vegas Bowl. We will make it through fourth quarter. We will make a first down. Hope, which has gone out of fashion this decade, was high.

Walt’s first season was not really disastrous, just typically mediocre. You would expect no more from a coach in his first season, unless you were a Stanford fan, in which case you were calling for Walt’s head on a platter, contemplating yet another year without a Bowl Game or a winning record. Stanford fans want a quick fix — even if we don’t particularly like football, it seems natural that, as long as we have a football team, it should be the best in the country. We wanted Walt to build us an empire, to find us another Elway, to give the Axe Committee a reason for breathing. He was doomed.

It wasn’t all his fault. Walt was thrust into catastrophic times and had very little to work with. Some of his older players were recruited by Tyrone Willingham eons ago; the younger guys, Teevens’ boys, were lost in the inevitable shuffle of new coaches, new assistants and new players to develop. Because Stanford has academic standards, it will always be difficult to compete in the Pac-10 — our players need good SAT scores, whereas USC only requires basic motor skills and an interest in sociology.

Walt valiantly struggled against these problems, and quietly, proudly failed. He could have just been an unlucky sap, doing his best and failing amicably — the sort of husband you remain good friends with after your adulterous affair precipitates a divorce — except that we gave him our confidence, our faith and a $90 million new Stadium, a shiny new castle for King Walt the First.

That accursed stadium was the big selling point of this season. Pep rallies cheered the ludicrous feats of engineering that got it built in just one year. From his throne room up high in the heavens over Redwood City, Lord Arrillaga blessed us, his children, with garlic fries, comfortable stadium seats and extra restrooms. The stage was set for the greatest season of Stanford football yet.

I happened to attend a kickoff barbecue before school started, the sort of event where they make football players sit next to alumni old and rich enough to have great-grandchildren at the Law School. It was hard for anyone to be optimistic, but it was the start of a new year, wine was prevalent and there are no atheists in foxholes.

Standing in front of the players who depended on him and the donors who were kind enough to let him dig his own grave, Walt was painfully nondescript. His sentences constantly trailed off, as if even simple rah-rah pre-season platitudes weighed heavy on his beleaguered shoulders. “We think we’re tougher than a lot of people are giving us credit for,” he said, which is not quite as reassuring as, “We’re going to ram Berkeley’s head through their collective asshole and castrate them with butter knives,” but there were ladies present, after all.

The MC lobbed Harris softball questions — “Do you teach the players speed?” — and he swung back with tepid answers — “We’re trying to teach our guys to accelerate.” You got the feeling that Walt was not a man who enjoyed being questioned. When you’re a good or even semi-decent coach, no one cares if you run your players till they drop. But as the season progressed down the spiral, you could tell Walt was flailing. It came to a head in November, when Michael Okwo briefly quit the team.

I can only guess how a coach can keep coaching when no one believes in him. Perhaps Walt was looking forward to future seasons, developing young players in a losing-season trial-by-fire. Maybe he told himself lies. Hell, maybe he would have been happy if the whole team followed Okwo out the door.

But I come to praise Walt, not just bury him. This year’s Big Game saw the best performance by our team in a long, long time — probably the best they ever played under Harris, which is the sort of irony that makes evil men die laughing. You could feel the energy, there in that tiny Cardinal Red sliver of fans in that abhorrent hillside arena in that hippie shantytown across the bay. Our team played with authority. Ostrander hit his marks. Our defense took the Bears to the turf and made them beg for Mommy. Berkeley fans shut their mouths for the first time in five years. You could dare to hope. Watching the team run off at halftime, with all the possibility of glory at their fingertips — that was the first time, and the last, that we all loved Walt Harris.

We lost it in the fourth. One hopes Walt had the common decency to be a broken man. He leaves our football squad in the deepest circle of NCAA hell. Cynics joke that we’re not really at rock bottom, since we could have lost one more. Our new stadium has become a tomb for the embalmed corpse of Stanford Football, clawing off its fingertips trying to escape from the sarcophagus. The House That Walt Built has yet to see a victory. Maybe Walt was wrong for us; maybe we were wrong for Walt; maybe football is finished at Stanford. These are hopeless times.

Ah, Walt Harris! Ah, Humanity!

Darren Franich knows global warming is a hoax. Pollution doesn’t cause climate change; John Arrillaga causes climate change. Email him at dfranich@stanford.edu.