Need to win gets the best of Louisville again
Petrino’s firing highlights coach’s and school’s flaws
Less than a year ago, Bobby Petrino was in a New York City ballroom waiting to see if his quarterback, Lamar Jackson, would win the Heisman Trophy. Jackson came in third, but that was OK: He had won it the year before, the first Louisville player to do so.
And besides, in the previous four seasons with Petrino as their coach for the second time, the Cardinals had four winning campaigns, even as they joined the more competitive Atlantic Coast Conference.
The highs Petrino achieved — he is undoubtedly an offensive mastermind — made the fall that much more stark. On Sunday morning, after a 54-23 shellacking by No. 12 Syracuse (8-2) brought the Cardinals to 2-8, Petrino was fired.
“We owe it to our student-athletes and fans to get this turned around,” the athletic director, Vince Tyra, said in a statement. “I did not have the confidence that it was going to happen next season without a change, and it needs to start happening now.”
Louisville plans to pay Petrino the full cost of his contract buyout, which at a news conference Tyra estimated was about $14 million. Safeties coach Lorenzo Ward is the interim coach.
It is not the most surprising or ignominious exit in Petrino’s career. He first became coach at Louisville before the 2003 season. He then left to be the coach of the Atlanta Falcons after leading the Cardinals to a 12-1 record and an Orange Bowl win in the 2006 season. He left his new job after less than one season.
For many fans, Petrino’s name is synonymous with an ugly scandal that in 2012 ended his tenure at his next head coaching stop, Arkansas. There, a motorcycle crash led to revelations of an affair with a football staff member and related misdeeds, such as lying to his boss.
No matter for Louisville: In 2014, when its coach, Charlie Strong, left for Texas after bringing the program back to college football’s heights with 11-2 and 12-1 records the previous two seasons, it rehired Petrino. The athletic director at the time, Tom Jurich, said that Petrino, who had been Western Kentucky’s coach for a year, convinced him that he was “a changed man.”
Jurich also had previously hired Petrino, two years after Jurich had also snagged Rick Pitino as the men’s basketball coach.
In recent years, Pitino was the focus of multiple scandals — such as the restaurant tryst, and allegations that a staff member paid for prostitutes to entertain recruits in on-campus housing. He also brought Louisville its third national championship, in 2013. As Petrino returned to the university, Jurich’s game plan became clear.
It went roughly like this: As a former commuter college in an unfamiliar conference that has blue bloods in football (Clemson, Florida State, Virginia Tech) and basketball (Duke, North Carolina, Syracuse), Louisville could not afford to be squeamish when it came to the character of coaches who knew how to win.
Where other teams might not have rehired Petrino or retained Pitino, Louisville would — and would thereby benefit from their undeniable acumen as other programs would not.
It all blew up, starting a little more than a year ago. In summer 2017, the NCAA penalized Louisville for the prostitute scandal — of which Pitino had denied knowledge. It later formally revoked that 2013 national title, the only time it has vacated a Division I championship in its signature tournament, men’s basketball.
A few months later, Louisville was at the centre of the suspected network of bribes and misconduct in college basketball recruiting brought forth by federal prosecutors. Pitino and Jurich were ousted in October 2017. (Last month, the father of a Louisville recruit testified that he received money not only from Adidas, Louisville’s apparel sponsor, but also from Louisville’s former associate head coach.)
On and off the football field, there were also early indications of trouble. The very night in December 2016 when Jackson won the Heisman, two players and a cheerleader were shot at a celebration. The Cardinals went on to lose their bowl game, making Jackson one of few modern Heisman winners whose team did not win at least 10 games.
Football attendance fell last season and this one, even as a $64-million expansion was completed at Cardinal Stadium — which had been known as Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium before this summer, when the eponymous chief executive John Schnatter apologized for using a racial slur on a conference call and stepped down from the university’s board of trustees. It has been that kind of year.
There is cause for the Louisville faithful to be optimistic, though. Tyra, a local businessperson, managed to hire everyone’s ideal candidate for men’s basketball coach: Chris Mack, who grew up nearby, outside Cincinnati, and had made Xavier a top program.
There is an even more obvious candidate to be the new football coach: Jeff Brohm, a Derby City native who starred as a Cardinals quarterback, returned later as quarterbacks coach under Petrino and is in his second year as coach of Purdue. Last year, the Boilermakers had their first winning season since 2011; this year, they are 5-5 with a dramatic win over No. 10 Ohio State (9-1) at home.
At the same time, it was perhaps never quite realistic to expect Louisville to contend in football while playing in the same division as Florida State and Clemson. Clemson was the team with the offensive firepower when the two met last month, winning, 77-16. The No. 2 Tigers (10-0) give every indication of heading for their fourth consecutive ACC title and trip to the College Football Playoff.
“There’s a high standard out there,” Tyra said Sunday, adding, “We know we’re chasing Clemson.”
Maybe that was part of the problem all along.