Petrino’s Cardinals didn’t win enough when they had Lamar Jackson, and they cratered after he left. Fortunately, there’s an ideal replacement candidate out there.
To no surprise, Louisville is firing football coach Bobby Petrino, Yahoo Sports was first to report on Sunday.
An ugly season had only gotten uglier lately. Petrino’s recent run has included an epic drubbing at the hands of Clemson in Week 10, which dropped the Cardinals to 2-7. They gave up 77 points and nearly 12 yards per play, somehow looking even worse than they were supposed to against a title contender. Then, they gave up 54 points in a loss to Syracuse, which doesn’t sound as bad as a 37-7 halftime score really made it.
So ends the 57-year-old’s long, winding history with the school, unless Louisville decides to hire him again in six or seven years, which nobody should rule out.
There’s one exceedingly obvious replacement candidate: Purdue coach Jeff Brohm, a former Cardinals QB and assistant.
A lot of buzz surrounded Brohm even before the firing, and it’ll ramp up now.
Louisville AD Vince Tyra on firing Bobby Petrino: “I did not have the confidence that it was going to happen next season without a change & it needs to start happening now.” Source told @WatchStadium Purdue’s Jeff Brohm, a UL grad, is “clear cut No. 1 choice” of Cards
— Brett McMurphy (@Brett_McMurphy) November 11, 2018
There are more pros than cons. The simplest reason to pick Brohm is that he’s quickly turned around both WKU and Purdue, and he’s even replaced Petrino before:
Brohm has taken over for Petrino, his former boss, before. He took over an eight-win Western Kentucky in 2014. He maintained that level of wins in 2014, then won 12 in 2015 and 11 in 2016. After he left and handed the program to another offensive-minded coach in Mike Sanford, the Hilltoppers have gone 6-7 and started 2018 going 1-5.
Meanwhile, Brohm’s beaten the brakes off Ohio State and made the Boilers into one of the most flowing, exciting offenses in the Big Ten. He consistently makes offenses good when he shows up somewhere, and WKU’s floundered since his exit. Brohm’s a lot like Petrino, except earlier in his career and without Petrino’s long trail of shenanigans.
I don’t think Louisville AD Vince Tyra should overthink his top choice. Brohm’s buyout to leave Purdue is $4.4 million before Dec. 5 and $3.3 million after it, so the Cardinals would probably rather wait bring him onboard. That’s because getting rid of Petrino won’t be cheap.
Firing Petrino will cost Louisville a lot, because while the Cardinals prepared for him to leave, they didn’t really prepare to have to fire him.
Petrino’s exact buyout amount depends on some unsettled variables, but it’s likely to settle at about $14 million. Former Cards athletic director Tom Jurich gave him a fat extension in the spring of 2016, before Jackson lifted off to the Heisman.
The contract, a copy of which SB Nation reviewed, had detailed provisions designed to keep Petrino from doing what he’s always done: leaving for another job. It had a clause that said Petrino and his agent couldn’t even backchannel for other jobs while he worked for Louisville. It had huge buyout amounts that other schools would have to pay to hire him away. And those buyout amounts would go down by half if Jurich was no longer AD. And he now isn’t, having been fired amid the FBI’s college basketball corruption investigation.
The contract was designed to do its own PR, making clear that Petrino and Jurich were betting on each other and their futures being at Louisville:
*Look at how confident Louisville was in Petrino, making this huge financial pledge.*
*Look at how confident Petrino was in Jurich. The coach agreed to pay Louisvillea huge buyout in the event he left for another job — between $5.5 million and $10 million owed to the school, depending on when.
There’s never a good time for a school to pay a coach $14 million not to work, even before considering whatever the next coaching staff and various assistant buyouts will cost. But this is an extra bad time for Louisville, which is in a legal battle with ex-basketball coach Rick Pitino over his $37 million buyout and might be on bad terms with mega-donor Papa John, whose name came off the football stadium after he got caught saying the N word.
Petrino started his journey as Louisville’s head coach in 2003. A lot’s happened, as he’s built a rep as one of the sport’s least reliable employees.
He went 29-8 in his first three years, then signed a 10-year contract before the 2006 season. He talked like a man who wasn’t going anywhere, saying Louisville was “where my family wants to be and where I want to be.” Then he left less than a year later, parlaying a 12-1 year into the Atlanta Falcons’ head coaching gig. He in turn left that job after lessthan a year to take over at Arkansas.
Four seasons and one motor cycle crash alongside a mistress that Petrino later lied about, Arkansas fired him. He took a year off, went to Western Kentucky for one year, and reassumed his old job at Louisville when the Cardinals wanted a proven winner to replace Charlie Strong, who’d just left for Texas. Petrino lasted five seasons in his second go-around at Louisville, topping out at nine wins. He signed Heisman winner Lamar Jackson, and then his offense fell off a cliff the year after Jackson left for the NFL.
His latest Louisville spell also included the Cardinals getting in some trouble for receiving confidential Wake Forest game plan documents in 2016, as part of #Wakeyleaks.
Petrino usually doesn’t leave programs better than he found them. He’s not here. Louisville’s recruiting class for 2019 is well off the Cards’ standard and will be hard to salvage.
Petrino’s out because Louisville didn’t capitalize on having Jackson and didn’t stay afloat once he left.
Louisville was an ACC Atlantic contender in 2016, but a devastating loss at Clemson in Week 5 prevented the Cardinals from winning the division. They later lost games to Houston and Kentucky, then got crushed by LSU in the Citrus Bowl. They lost five games in 2017, despite Jackson playing at a level not far off his Heisman pace from the year prior.
The end result: Louisville had two years starting a Heisman QB, and the Cardinals lost nine games in those two years.
In 2018, Petrino’s looked bad. Fans have regularly remarked he’s looked disinterested. The team hasn’t been competitive most of the time. Against Florida State, he flipped an almost certain win into a loss by making one of the year’s most confounding play calls.
Louisville wasn’t supposed to be great without Jackson. It also wasn’t supposed to be one of the worst teams in Power 5 and, really, the country. But that’s what the program became.