Kentucky Wildcats beat MSU & Louisville Cardinals sell their soul
By Wayne
Mandatory Credit: Jim Brown-USA TODAY Sports
News broke a couple days ago that Louisville Cardinals AD Tom Jurich sold his soul to the devil and has decided to bring back Bobby Petrino. Yes, that Bobby Petrino. The one who bolted after signing a 1,000 year contract only to stiff the dirty birds for the Atlanta Falcons. 13 games into that he decided he didn’t want to do that anymore so he moved on to Arkansas where he promptly found him a mistress and wrecked a motorcycle, effectively ending his career there. Western Kentucky throws him a bone and he promptly coaches the Hilltoppers to a victory over Kentucky in 2013. So here they are, back where they started. I don’t understand, but hey…it’s Louisville…they never make sense.
"Bobby Petrino will apparently get his old job back, while Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have been rejected by the Hall of Fame voters once again. The lesson here is mostly about the people who are giving it. Taking a stand is easy when you have nothing to lose. Hall of Fame voters find it very easy to keep Bonds, Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire out of the Hall, because voters have no real stake in the Hall. They just have a stake in the voting. They don’t get a share of Hall ticket sales. They don’t own hotels in Cooperstown. If they want to keep Rafael Palmeiro’s mustache off a plaque, they can do that and feel good about it. There are no negative ramifications, except maybe some backlash on Twitter, but in this media climate, is that even negative? Just spell the username right, fellas. Thx. There are good arguments for keeping known steroid users out of the Hall (though I’m not sure I buy them). But my fellow baseball writers, ask yourselves this: If you could keep your job by voting for Barry Bonds, would you do it? Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich is facing college football’s version of that question this week. Yahoo! Sports reported that Jurich’s hiring of Petrino is “imminent,” and I’m fairly appalled by the whole thing, but then, I’ve never had a stake in Louisville winning a football game. If fans bought tickets to watch team GPAs rise, Jurich would hire the best professor he could find. Instead, he will apparently make two gambles: One on Petrino behaving, and the other on Louisville fans and alumni caring mostly about winning. The latter is the safer bet. Petrino can say he has learned from past mistakes. He certainly has enough learning material. Jurich may try selling the media on Reformed Bobby, which would look great on a t-shirt. And a self-help book titled “How I Changed And You Can Too,” by Bobby Petrino, would be a bestseller among people who buy books but don’t actually read them. But it is hard for people to change, and harder for them to change as fundamentally as Petrino needed to change. Petrino is known largely for sending too many X’s and O’s to a woman other than his wife, but his sins are far more numerous and complicated than that. When he coached at Arkansas, he hired the young lady out of a sea of job applicants. When he was caught, after his motorcycle accident, he lied to his bosses about the affair. I enjoyed Petrino’s brief Oopsie Media Tour after Arkansas fired him. He said he was trying to figure out why he slept with a young blonde woman who was available to him. It is a mystery, isn’t it? Before the Arkansas wreck(s), he ditched the Atlanta Falcons with three games left in the season, without showing the courage to actually tell his players in person. He left them a note. I assume he billed the Falcons for the paper. Louisville is well acquainted with Petrino’s truth allergy. In his last stint with the school, he secretly interviewed for the Auburn job that was held by his former boss, Tommy Tuberville. He learned a lesson: interviewing for jobs without telling people is fun. He had a lot of fun for the next few years. Petrino built a Louisville program to win games and help Bobby Petrino, as longtime Louisville sportswriter Eric Crawford outlines here. He did both. Has he changed? Well, maybe. Most of us would like to believe that. But that isn’t really the relevant question. Louisville is not hiring Petrino because of the ways he might be different, but for the way he is the same."
Naturally, some members of the Louisville Athletic Association are a touch uneasy about the hire but, hey, what do they know? All Tom Jurich want to do is “win baby” and there’s no denying that Bobby Petrino is as great a coach as he is a questionably moral person. So what’s Louisville got to lose? Money and games.
"The University of Louisville’s Athletic Association’s personnel committee is scheduled to meet at 10 a.m. Thursday with the task of approving the hire of Bobby Petrino as the Cardinals’ new football coach. There is a sense that such meetings are often simply a rubber stamp — and U of L has scheduled a 10:30 news conference afterward — but several members of the Athletic Association told The Courier-Journal said they would like athletic director Tom Jurich to address some questions about Petrino’s past. The committee members, some speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss personnel matters, said they expect the meeting to include discourse rather than just instant approval."
For a quick recap of the Bobby Petrino saga, feast your eyes on the best quickie in history (thanks Deadspin.com)
"Multiple reports, following Yahoo’s Pat Forde, are saying that Bobby Petrino — liar, scoundrel, indifferent recruiter, proven winner — will be the new head coach at Louisville, the very program he ditched in 2006 for a short stint with the Atlanta Falcons. After his cameo in Atlanta he went to Arkansas and enjoyed a few years of prolific points-scoring before crashing his motorcycle, getting caught romancing a staffer whose hire he may have illegally fast-tracked, and subsequently trying to enlist state police to help cover up the affair. In other news Wednesday, a wandering dog somewhere circled back to lap up its own cold vomit."