If Jesus were an athletic director…

… first thing he’d do is hire Bobby Petrino as Kentucky’s next football head coach.

Hard to believe Mitch Barnhart was unmoved by that appeal.

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A coy Bobby Petrino?

Gag me with a spoon…

Take us back in your career a bit. You were at Louisville and then jump to the NFL and the Jacksonville Jaguars. How’d that work?:

“I was sitting in the meeting room with my brother, Paul, and we were watching video from the year before, right around this time. … The secretary came in and said, ‘There’s a guy by the name of Tom Coughlin on the phone,’ and we both kind of laughed and joked, yeah right. … I went and got on the phone and Coach Coughlin told me his offensive coordinator just left and took the head job with the Cleveland Browns and he wanted to hire a young quarterback coach and grow him in to be the coordinator. … I flew down there, went through the interview. … I really didn’t want to take the job. I was real hesitant about taking it, but I didn’t want to look back 10 years from now and say, ‘What if I would’ve done it?’ … Went and did it and had a great experience.”

Seriously, does anybody believe it took Petrino more than a nanosecond to make up his mind on that career move?

Epic PAWWWWWLLLLLL.

Presented without comment.

Bobby Petrino will join us at 2:15 CT today.—
Paul Finebaum (@finebaum) December 12, 2012

Bobby Petrino’s Redemption Song

So, the wandering coach has himself a new gig at Western Kentucky, and the chattering class is predictably outraged.  Stewart Mandel is in a state of gastric distress and thinks that Something Should Be Done:

If all of this makes you want to vomit, then you’re living under the fantasy notion that winning with integrity is still a priority in college sports. It is in a few places, but one needs to only follow the recent conference realignment wars to know that ego and/or desperation drives most decisions these days. And it’s not like anyone in power is stepping in to stop it.

Man, if they ever made a rule that punished institutions for hiring horn dogs, people in power would be the first ones to feel its bite.  Besides, it’s also not like anyone is going into this deal with his or her eyes closed, as even Mandel admits.

Meanwhile USA Today’s Mike Lopresti clucks that it’s all too soon (exactly when is the right time for something like this, anyway?) and wonders what the parents will think.

Western Kentucky has a new football coach. What are the parents of a high school recruit supposed to say, the day Bobby Petrino sits in their living room and promises that he will be a role model for their son, and that his program will instill values and principles — not to mention a pretty good passing game?

The same things parents were saying when he was at Arkansas, of course.  It’s not like people didn’t already have a good handle on Petrino’s character before he took that motorcycle ride.  The only difference this last time was that he shat in his own bed.  Ironically, it’s likely to be the one lesson he learns about how to conduct himself.

In the meantime, we’ll get the pleasure of watching him open next season coaching against two SEC teams.  If he beats either, it’ll start him back down the road to a major conference coaching job that much sooner.  I just hope WKU did a good job with his contract numbers.  If the school plays its cards right on the buyout, it could turn a profit on Petrino, which, when you think about it, would be the cherry on top of the cynical sundae.

Go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do.

I think it’s best to look at this story as the coaching equivalent of a baseball player going to AAA on a rehab assignment, especially when you remember where Arkansas State’s last two head coaches are now.