LITTLE ROCK — Some national pundits have fired flaming arrows at Jeff Long claiming he should have seen the pattern of lies before he hired Bobby Petrino.
They claim the Arkansas athletic director ignored the history when he hired Petrino and thus has culpability.
Wrong.
The known lies Petrino told were about jobs. Either about getting a new job or getting a raise at an old job.
When it comes to coaches talking about jobs, if their lips are moving they probably are not telling the truth. That is almost universal.
There have been exceptions.
So Petrino lying to Louisville officials and those with the Atlanta Falcons was not really a red flag.
If there was a red flag, it might have been in what happened in 2004 when Petrino appeared to be LSU’s top choice but after one interview, the Tigers’ brass switched to Les Miles, who Petrino cursed during their televised game last year. And according to reports, Petrino interviewed for a lot of jobs he didn’t get.
However, there was never any reason to believe he wasn’t being honest about how much he wanted the Arkansas job. So much so he was willing to desert the Falcons before the season ended and without taking time to tell the players why he was leaving.
He wanted out of the NFL and in the SEC so much he had his agent use contacts to get in touch with then-University of Arkansas system President B. Alan Sugg.
At the point the Razorbacks recruiting class was open game, and the fan base was fractured and disenchanted that a team with three future NFL starting running backs was on its way to an 8-5 final record.
Long needed a successful college coach. Petrino went 41-9 in his four years as the head coach at Louisville.
And he wanted the job.
Compared to the likes of Jim Grobe and Tommy Bowden, Petrino looked like Nick Saban on training wheels.
Grobe had gone 28-12 over a three-year stretch at Wake Forest when he was interviewed by Long. He’s 14-23 since. Bowden was fired at Clemson. He used Arkansas to get a raise. (Coaches see it as playing the game, but basically it is lying.)
Petrino was not especially charming when he came to the UA, and he grew increasingly difficult to deal with after each success, but there was no indication his previous lying was for anything other than jobs. There was no hint of fraud or infidelity.
Long was as right to hire Petrino as he was to fire him.
Another blame that is being slung at Long is that he OK’d the hiring of Jessica Dorrell, a name that could go down in history as the femme fatale of the football program.
That one falls entirely on one person, Petrino.
He asked athletic department officials, as early as March 9, to request a waiver so he could begin interviewing for the open student-athlete development coordinator job before the mandated job-posting period of 30 days expired.
When a coach who has gone 21-5 the last two seasons makes that request, you get the waiver. It came at 10:44 in the morning, 1 hour, 14 minutes after Dorrell had interviewed.
This part of the messy affair is not over.
Dorrell, apparently, was not only Petrino’s girlfriend, but she was not qualified for a position with a job description asking for two years of experience within a football program.
And she was not a unanimous choice.
Benjamin Wilkerson, an NFL veteran, has been reported as coming in second for the job. Wilkerson, an All-American at LSU who won the 2004 Rimington Award as the nation’s top center, had been in the Tigers’ athletic department for two years.
Granted, the job of student-athlete development coordinator has been cast into the national spotlight, but it is really at the bottom of the football food chain.
Long shouldn’t be expected to pay a lot of attention to the hiring of the 19th slot in the football office.
Sports, Pages 15 on 04/17/2012