On Tuesday, Arkansas fired head football coach Bobby Petrino. Hogs’ Athletic Director Jeff Long had no other choice. The dismissal of the polarizing Petrino capped nearly a week of turmoil following a motorcycle accident. It appears that Coach “P” was riding his Harley with a twenty-five year old former Arkansas volleyball player; a young lady that he was having an “inappropriate” relationship with. Not only was the married, father of four, having an affair, but he had hired the former school fundraiser as an employee in the football program. He also was on record as giving her $20,000. Had he simply told the truth, he would have been disciplined, but not fired. After all, the man had taken a troubled Arkansas program, and in four seasons had brought the Razorbacks back to national prominence. The Hogs were 11-2 in 2011, with losses coming to National Champion Alabama and second ranked LSU. But today, Bobby Petrino is out of a job, with no payout. He should have learned a great lesson from former Tennessee basketball coach Bruce Pearl.
Pearl, who had taken the Vols’ basketball program to perennial SEC Title contender status, was fired following the 2010-2011 season for lying about some minor NCAA rules infractions; the key word there is lying. One lie after another, both to the NCAA and to Tennessee Athletic Department officials, led to Pearl’s demise. Bobby Petrino was fired for basically the same reason. Athletic Director Jeff Long gave Petrino several chances to “come clean” about his inappropriate conduct, but Petrino chose to lie. He thought he was bigger than the University of Arkansas, but on Tuesday he discovered twenty-two wins in the last two seasons wasn’t enough to overcome his lies.
In an emotional press conference Tuesday evening, Long said, “He made a decision, a conscious decision, to mislead the public on Tuesday, and in doing so, negatively and adversely affected the University of Arkansas and our football program.” Long choked back tears as he continued to say, “ In short, Coach Petrino engaged in a pattern of misleading and manipulative behavior, designed to deceive me and members of the athletic staff, both before and after the motorcycle accident.”
There is a rather large group of Razorback faithful who support Petrino, but most fans and citizens of the “Land of Opportunity” state, support Jeff Long’s decision. No matter what choice Long made in dealing with his head football coach, he was going to lose some supporters. But the decision he made allowed him to keep his self-respect and that is more important in the great “game of life.”
For the time being, assistant coach Taver Johnson will lead the team on an interim basis. Long also said at the press conference, he would be comfortable with an interim coach guiding the team in 2012. This close to the start of the season means the list of good qualified coaching candidates is a very short one, so Arkansas may have no other choice.
After the smoke clears in Fayetteville, what lessons can we all learn from the Bobby Petrino debacle? I hope we can learn to be faithful to our wives and family. I also hope we learn that no one man or even one group of men is bigger than the largest university in the state. I hope we learn that the things we do in the “game of life” are certainly bigger and more important than the game of football. And I hope we all learn to simply tell the truth. If Coach Petrino had just paid attention to what happened to Bruce Pearl at Tennessee, he would still be the “Big Hog.”
Contact Randy Smith at rsmithsports@comcast.net
----
Randy Smith has been covering sports in Tennessee for the last 42 years. After leaving WRCB-TV in 2009, he has continued his broadcasting career as a free-lance play-by-play announcer, author and is also a media concepts teacher at Red Bank High School in Chattanooga. He is currently teaching an "Intro To Sportscasting" class at Red Bank, the only class of its type in Tennessee. Randy Smith's career has included a 17-year stint as scoreboard host and pre-game talk show host on the widely regarded "Vol Network". He has also done play by play of more than 500 college football, basketball, baseball and softball games on ESPN, ESPN2, Fox Sports, CSS and Tennessee Pay Per View telecasts. He was selected as "Tennessee's Best Sports Talk Show Host" in 1998 by the Associated Press. He has won other major awards including, "Best Sports Story" in Tennessee and his "Friday Night Football" shows on WRCB-TV twice won "Best Sports Talk Show In Tennessee" awards. He has also been the host of "Inside Lee University Basketball" on CSS for the past 10 years. Randy and his wife, Shelia, reside in Hixson. They have two married children (Christi and Chris Perry Davey and Alison Smith). They also have one grandchild (Coleman).