Innovative offensive minds are all the rage in today’s football landscape.
Longtime football fans across West Virginia know Scott Tinsley to be among the first.
Many are now mourning the death of Tinsley after he passed away Tuesday at the age of 62.
“Very tough news. It’s hard to imagine,” said George Washington High School football coach Steve Edwards Jr. “I lost a really good friend.”
“He’s a good friend and a great coach,” said Bob Gobel. “There will never be another one like him.”
Gobel was head football coach at WVU Tech in 1989 and recalls being in need of an offensive coordinator.
He eventually settled on Tinsley, who had starred as a quarterback at St. Albans High School, where he graduated from in 1980 before going on to play and coach at Appalachian State.
“It turned out to be one of the best decisions I made,” Gobel said.
WVU Tech finished 7-2-1 and won the West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference in 1989.
“We won the conference championship for the first time in 40 years and Scott had a lot to do with it with the way that he coached the passing game,” Gobel said. “He was an incredible offensive mind. He was ahead of his time in a lot of that. The thing about him that’s incredible to me to this day is how he could see things on the field that nobody else could.”
Both Gobel and Tinsley would later serve as head coach at West Virginia State, while Tinsley returned to WVU Tech in 2008 as head coach — a position he held for four seasons before the school discontinued its football program.
🏈 | WVSU Athletics Statement on Scott Tinsley pic.twitter.com/zsuiohdAhE
— WVSU Athletics (@WVSU_GoJackets) February 17, 2026
In between his time as head coach at two college programs, Tinsley had a lengthy stint as an assistant and head coach at Nitro High School.
He served as an assistant on the Wildcats’ 1998 team that finished 14-0 and won Class AAA behind a record-setting performance from quarterback J.R. House, who threw 10 touchdown passes in the final against Morgantown.
Today, the state’s top prep quarterback is annually presented with the J.R. House Award.
As head coach, Tinsley led Nitro back to the title game in 2005, only for the Wildcats to lose to the Mohigans in overtime. Nitro was 51-20 during Tinsley’s time as head coach, which spanned 2002-07.
Tinsley later served as an assistant at Hurricane High School before returning to his alma mater, where he was head coach at St. Albans.
Later in his career, Tinsley coached alongside Edwards as an assistant at GW, and most recently, he was offensive coordinator at Buffalo High School and worked with son-in-law Andy Anderson, the Bison head coach.
“No one outworked Scott Tinsley — nobody,” Edwards said. “Everything he did wasn’t by accident. It was calculated. He was really great at preparation and calling a game.”
It wasn’t a coincidence that Buffalo quarterback Hunter Rutan broke the state’s single-game passing yardage record this season with 637 in a contest against Richwood.
“He had the quarterback whisperer with him. I don’t know what all it is he had, but nobody else had it,” Gobel said. “You give him a kid with a little ability and he would have him shred defenses.”
Edwards will remember Tinsley as someone who shared a deep love for two things above all else.
“A lot of people didn’t know Scott to be as compassionate as he was and he really loved his daughter and loved football,” Edwards said. “That was his life.”