LIKE IT IS : Petrino provides Arkansas fans sigh of relief
Posted on Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Hogalujahs echoed across the Natural State on Tuesday night as word spread that Bobby Petrino would be named Arkansas’ head football coach.
Jeff Long hit a home run. Forget the first two weeks of the coaching search and focus on Tuesday.
While you are forgetting, forget everything you hear out of Atlanta. They are not happy that Petrino is leaving the Falcons before the end of the season, but the fact is, with three games remaining, the season has already ended for them.
Some might say it was a dogfight of a season anyway.
The timing of Petrino’s hiring was in the best interest of the Arkansas Razorbacks, for recruiting reasons as well as putting to bed the outlandish rumor that Long was trying to get out of his contract so he could go to Nebraska.
Absolutely not true.
And for the sake of John White’s blood pressure — can you imagine the numbers he’d experience if Frank Broyles was named interim AD — let’s put it to rest.
The first reason Long would not be a candidate is that he was most recently at Pittsburgh.
The guy Long replaced at Pitt (Steve Pedersen ), who now is returning to replace Long, was fired a few months ago at Nebraska.
It doesn’t seem likely the Cornhuskers nation is going to want anything to do with any Panthers for a while.
Also, it seems very likely Nebraska will announce it is taking the interim off Tom Osborne’s title and he will be the athletic director for at least two years to see the program he created through some difficult times that he did not create.
Osborne is a very youthful 70 years old, has his political career behind him and is still deeply concerned about everything Husker.
One thing about Long, he never let that rumor or any others slow him down in his quest to find a head coach.
Counting today there are only four recruiting days left until everything shuts down until Jan. 8, the day after the BCS championship game.
There are 18 commitments to Arkansas who need to be contacted, starting today.
It apparently was a little tougher on Long to find the right guy because it seems White wanted to keep the Broyles tradition alive and hire only a head coach (Broyles detoured once and regretted it ).
Tuesday night’s announcement that Petrino would be coming on board opened the door to more than saving the recruiting class, it also started the healing process.
White cited Houston Nutt’s departure as the only way the fan base could be reunited, and Long enabled that to start by hiring the biggest name that came up during this search.
In an era when there are almost daily debriefings about the war, the search for a new Razorbacks football coach could not have been run any more covertly than if the CIA was in charge.
Which led to a lot of speculation and rumors.
Most of the rumors were unfounded and not worth addressing, but one such as Long leaving and how that would affect the search for a football coach had to be addressed.
It seems Long has been tireless in his pursuit of a coach. If he had not been flying on a private jet, he’d have enough frequent flier miles to take his family to Hawaii for the holiday.
When word started leaking Tuesday that it was going to be Petrino, all the talk was out of Atlanta, where there were some unhappy people.
Yet, their unhappiness was nothing compared to the sounds of relief that were called into Sportsrap on Tuesday night.
Razorbacks fans needed someone who has been to a BCS bowl, and winning was icing on the cake (Petrino and Louisville beat Jim Grobe and Wake Forest in the 2007 Orange Bowl ). It also was nice that he had some NFL experience, which is always a good thing when it comes to recruiting.
Tuesday night, Bobby Petrino, who won 82 percent of his college games and in four seasons never had a losing record, became the Razorbacks’ head coach.
And the Hogs nation said Hogalujah.
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