Bill McCartney filled stadiums as a college football coach. He led the Colorado Buffaloes for 13 seasons, winning three conference championships and one national title. Then, he filled stadiums again with Promise Keepers, the men’s movement that spurred millions to reaffirm commitments to Jesus, their wives and children, and their civic and social responsibilities.
McCartney said Promise Keepers grew out of tension in his own life. His zeal for success as a football coach came into conflict with his desire to be the husband and father he felt God wanted him to be. His struggle to reconcile those tensions led him to launch the ministry that fused evangelical spirituality, big-tent revivalism, sports celebrity, and therapeutic masculinity—and to eventually walk away from coaching while he was still at the top of his game.
He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2013. But his greatest legacy was as a Christian. While many Christian football coaches came before him and many after, few burned as bright as McCartney or extended their influence as wide.
“Bill McCartney’s absolute commitment to Jesus Christ was and is a beacon for all of us,” Bill Curry, a coaching contemporary, told Christianity Today. “We will always remember and do our best to honor his memory.”
McCartney died on Friday, January 10, at the age of 84.
McCartney was born on August 22, 1940, and grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Detroit. His mother was a homemaker who raised him and his two brothers. His father, an Irish Catholic who served in the Marines before going to work in an auto factory and rising to leadership in his local union, was a fanatic about three things: the Democratic party, the Catholic church, and Notre Dame football.
At an early age, McCartney learned to love football, too. Friends from that time remembered him as a natural leader, someone who would call the plays in their neighborhood football games even though he was younger than the other kids. Around 8 years old, he decided he wanted to be a coach.
“The idea, the concept, the preparation—all the intangible things associated with football,” he later wrote, “excited me perhaps more than the mere playing of the game.”
Pursuing his dream, he went to the University of Missouri, where he played linebacker and center for hall-of-fame coach Dan Devine. McCartney had average ability but unusual tenacity and an intuitive feel for the game, helping to lead the Tigers to three straight winning seasons.
While at Missouri, McCartney also met his wife, Lyndi Taussig. Raised Methodist, Lyndi converted to Catholicism after marrying McCartney. In the span of eight years, they had four children: Mike, Tom, Kristy, and Marc. In between the births of Mike and Tom, the family moved to Michigan, where McCartney began his climb up the coaching ladder.
The move, like much of McCartney’s life, was shaped by his faith. McCartney had just attended a Cursillo Weekend, a Catholic retreat designed for spiritual renewal. At the retreat he was told that within 72 hours, something would happen that would change his life. When his brother Tom called from Michigan offering him a coaching job, McCartney saw it as the promised event. He and his family packed within a day and headed north.
McCartney ascended quickly in the sports world. At 30, he was head coach for the basketball and football teams at Dearborn Divine Child High School. At 33, he led both teams to state titles. The next year, 1974, legendary coach Bo Schembechler did something he had never done before and hired a high school coach directly to his staff at the University of Michigan.
In the midst of his professional success, though, McCartney began to feel a tinge of concern about his faith.
“I thought I was a really good Christian!” McCartney later reflected. “After all, I went to mass every day, I said my prayers, and I tried to live by the Golden Rule.”
But deep down, he felt something was missing. He struggled with alcohol consumption, unable to stop at just one drink, and felt his professional ambition dominating his life.
“Nothing would stand in my way. Not Lyndi. Not my children. Not anything,” he recalled.
When he met Chuck Heater in 1974, a running back for the Michigan team, McCartney became intrigued with the young man’s poise, maturity, and sense of peace. He asked Heater what made him different, and the athlete invited him to a weekend with Athletes in Action, a sports ministry under the umbrella of Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru).
McCartney was stirred by the Christian athletes talking about their intimate relationship with Jesus. He committed his life to Christ and immediately began encouraging others to do the same.
“I thought he was downright obnoxious about it,” recalled Lyndi, who later had an evangelical experience of her own. “Every time he turned around, he was praising the Lord for everything.”
McCartney’s born-again faith brought him into the orbit of an emerging evangelical sports subculture. Yet he continued attending Mass and identified as a “born-again Catholic.” His spiritual life was shaped by Word of God, a charismatic Catholic group in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It was not until 1988 that McCartney stopped regularly attending Mass and joined a Protestant church. He became a member of a Vineyard congregation in Boulder, Colorado, a church where McCartney’s charismatic spirituality could be nurtured.
By that time, McCartney had turned around a moribund Colorado football program, becoming one of college football’s most intriguing and controversial coaches.
His outspoken faith and infusion of religion into the athletic program at a public university brought him frequent critics, and he clashed regularly with the American Civil Liberties Union.
McCartney agreed to temper some excesses within the program, but he turned up the dial on his public activism, lending his voice to socially conservative causes. He spoke at pro-life rallies and threw his support behind a proposed amendment to the Colorado state constitution that would bar cities from enacting laws to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination. These public stances brought him new waves of supporters in America’s culture wars, but also additional critics.
His family’s personal life was another source of controversy. Before the 1989 football season, news broke that McCartney’s 19-year-old daughter, Kristy, was pregnant—and that Colorado football player Sal Aunese, who tragically died of cancer that fall, was the father. McCartney was accused of not taking care of his own family while trying to impose his morality on the public.
On the football field, the Buffaloes proceeded to win 11 straight games, finishing the year ranked fourth in the country. The next year they won the national championship.
In between, McCartney and his friend, Dave Wardell—on their way to an event with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA)—dreamed up the idea for a movement of Christian men who would gather together in football stadiums for renewal and revival; men would then return home empowered to be spiritual leaders.
It started with a small group of 70 men, growing to 4,200 in 1991 and more than 1 million in 1996. Promise Keepers hit its cultural peak in 1997 with a rally in Washington, DC. According to sociologist James Mathisen, it was “the decade’s most unexpected and immediately successful movement within the American church.”
It was also a flashpoint for controversy and, as historians including Seth Dowland and Kristin Kobes Du Mez have noted, a complex movement that is difficult to categorize.
Some liberal and progressive groups warned that Promise Keepers was designed to impose a right-wing Christian agenda on America. They saw efforts to mobilize Christian men to assert their authority as leaders as an attempt to secure patriarchy, turning back the clock to more oppressive notions of marriage and family.
Some conservative Christians, meanwhile, criticized Promise Keepers for being too ecumenical, charismatic, and emotional. Advocates of a more aggressive, masculine Christianity, such as Seattle megachurch pastor Mark Driscoll, denounced Promise Keepers for not being manly enough.
Some evangelicals also resisted the movement’s focus on racial reconciliation, a priority born out of McCartney’s experience as a football coach and established early on as one of Promise Keepers’ core commitments. Rallies featured a racially diverse group of speakers, and McCartney and others urged white Christians to “seek forgiveness for the sins of our fathers and for the same racial oppression that continues to this day.”
In 1996, nearly 40 percent of the attendees said they disliked the emphasis on racial reconciliation. Even as Promise Keepers’ numbers declined, though, McCartney continued to emphasize the issue. Some observers said the focus on race was responsible for the decline of the men’s movement at the end of the decade.
McCartney was willing to forge ahead when he believed he was right, regardless of the consequences. That same commitment led him to leave his coaching days behind.
As he traveled around the country in the early 1990s, calling on Christian men to be better husbands and fathers, his wife, Lyndi, felt neglected. McCartney came to see he was not practicing what he preached. Coaching, he realized, had moved from a “stirring passion” to a “suffocating obsession”—an idol.
So he gave it up.
“A man’s job is to serve his wife and enable her to be everything that God created her to be,” he told journalist Michael Weinreb. “I enjoyed coaching too much. And that’s what pulled me out of it.”
McCartney’s national profile declined significantly in the 21st century, though Promise Keepers continue to stir the fascination of scholars and his coaching career was discussed in sports media. In 2015, ESPN released a documentary on McCartney’s time at Colorado, The Gospel According to Mac.
For his part, he spent little energy focusing on his legacy. Really, he once told the FCA’s magazine, there was only one thing in his life that was important.
“Nothing compares to the glory of knowing God,” McCartney said. “I’d let everyone know that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
McCartney’s wife, Lyndi, died in 2013. He is survived by the couple’s four children—Michael, Thomas, Kristy, and Marc—and ten grandchildren. One of his grandchildren, T. C. McCartney, is the quarterbacks coach for the New England Patriots.
“While we mourn his loss, we also celebrate the extraordinary life he lived and the love he shared with everyone around him,” the family said in a statement. “Coach Mac touched countless lives with his unwavering faith, boundless compassion, and enduring legacy as a leader, mentor, and advocate for family, community, and faith.”
A memorial service is being planned. The family asked that donations be made to a local church in his name.
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