LITTLE ROCK — One thing quickly became obvious last week at SEC media days.
All that talk last January about the Arkansas Razorbacks playing in the BCS Championship Game was gone.
No doubt much of that is because Bobby Petrino is gone. Throughout his ordeal, no one ever said the man can’t coach football. He may have had one of the greatest football minds in all of college football.
And that’s why he’ll land on his feet.
There is a program out there that will forgive and forget, just like Arkansas did when Petrino slipped out of Atlanta.
He might have been a jerk who faded the truth, but he was the Razorbacks’ jerk and that made him better than OK in the Natural State.
His crime last spring doesn’t compare to Joe Paterno’s or even Jim Tressel’s.
No doubt Petrino created pain within his family and some short-term embarrassment for the UA, but there were no NCAA violations like at Ohio State. There were no sexual assaults like at Penn State.
Petrino is in the process of picking up the pieces of his life and putting them back together. Reportedly, he and his wife are together, living in an apartment on a golf course in Rogers.
They apparently are seen at Mass every Sunday.
Last week he caddied for his daughter in a golf tournament at Lexington, Ky., something he wouldn’t have had time to do if he was coaching the Razorbacks.
Probably what Petrino needed even more than a dose of humbleness was some oldfashioned family time.
It also was revealed last week that he had picked up the phone and talked to his mentor, John L. Smith, and to several key Arkansas players. He apologized to them.
You have to have remorse before you can have true healing.
Staying on the course he is on now and being one of the elite coaches in college football will get Petrino back into football.
It may not be in the SEC — although you can’t really rule out Kentucky if it makes a change — but it could be a place like Texas Tech, where Tommy Tuberville doesn’t appear to be real happy.
Yes, the irony of that would get tons of attention from ESPN. Auburn tried to make a deal for Petrino when Tuberville was still the head coach there. He led the Tigers to an undefeated season the next year.
Most likely, Petrino will have to take a step back, maybe go out West, back to his roots.
Time heals all wounds, and that’s all Petrino needs right now is some passing of time.
This time next year, he’ll probably be studying film and getting ready for fall practice. College football is all about winning now, and Petrino knows how to win.
Just because the media has cooled its jets on the Hogs doesn’t mean they can’t be competitive. No one at media days had a bad word to say about Smith.
It is just that after last season’s Cotton Bowl victory, national pundits were predicting the Razorbacks would go to the BCS Orange Bowl in January, where they would probably play Southern Cal.
When the media voted on the predicted order of finish for the SEC championship, who would win in Atlanta, the Razorbacks came in a distant fifth with four first-place votes. LSU had 129 votes and Alabama 65, followed by Georgia, (14) and South Carolina (6).
That’s not much confidence when it comes to the BCS championship, but the media has correctly picked only 20 percent of the winners in the past 20 years.
Sports, Pages 19 on 07/26/2012