Bill McCartney

Bill McCartney, a football coach who in the 1980s took the University of Colorado from perennial losers to national champions, but who later left behind his $350,000 annual salary to refashion his locker-room message about prayer and sacrifice into a sprawling men’s evangelical movement, died on Friday January 10 2025 in Boulder, Colo. He was 84. The cause was complications of dementia. McCartney won the Bear Bryant Award for the nation’s best college football coach in 1990 and was rewarded by the University of Colorado with a rich 15-year contract. As the founder of the Promise Keepers, a men-only Christian group based in Denver, Mr. McCartney reached his greatest influence in 1997, when an event he staged in Washington drew an estimated half-million men to the National Mall. He founded the Promise Keepers in 1990. The group’s first meeting drew 4,200 men to a basketball court in Boulder. McCartney often preached to small groups, but he was best known for staging rallies attended by tens of thousands of men at football stadiums. By the mid-1990s, the Promise Keepers had a budget of about $100 million, employed 345 people and could claim that millions of men had attended its events nationwide. In 1997, with its system for collecting donations in disarray, the organization laid off its entire staff. It soon reconstituted itself as a smaller organization, although it continued to hold meetings that attracted thousands of men for several years. McCartney is survived by his daughter Kristyn; three sons, Michael, Thomas and Marc; 10 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Lyndi (Taussig) McCartney, died in 2013.