This is a tale of two college football coaches, or, more specifically, two athletics directors. One set is experiencing the best of times, the other the worst.
The athletics directors are Tom Jurich at Louisville and Mitch Barnhart at Kentucky. The coaches are Bobby Petrino of Louisville and Mark Stoops of Kentucky.
Heading into Saturday’s game at Marshall, the Cards are ranked as high as No. 3 in the nation and are coming off a shocking 63-20 trouncing of Florida State that got them on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
The Cardinals now have a clear path at a berth in the national championship playoff and the new Heisman Trophy front-runner in wondrous sophomore quarterback Lamar “Action” Jackson.
Mitch Barnhart
If they take care of business against the Thundering Herd, as they most certainly will, their Oct. 1 showdown with preseason No. 1 Clemson likely will get them on ESPN’s College GameDay again and be the most watched game up to this point in the season.
The Wildcats, on the other hand are 1-2 after surviving a shootout with lowly New Mexico State. They play host to South Carolina Saturday in a second-tier Southeastern Conference game that’s more or less a tossup.
Even if the Wildcats manage to even their record against the Gamecocks, their next outing will be at No. 1 Alabama on Oct. 1, the same day U of L is playing Clemson. That figures to be a UK loss of epic proportions.
To understand how each program arrived at its current station, it’s necessary to study the following timeline.
Nov. 14, 2012 – In an open Internet letter to UK fans, Barnhart announces that UK coach Joker Phillips, whom the A.D. had appointed as “coach in waiting” to Rich Brooks in January 2008, will not be retained. Phillips is allowed to finish out a 2-9 season while the search for his successor gets under way.
Nov. 27, 2012 – Less than two weeks after Phillips is fired, Stoops is announced as UK’s new head coach. Most pundits, including this one, think it’s a good hire. Stoops came from Florida State, where he was defensive coordinator for Jimbo Fisher. He’s also a brother of Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops.
Dec. 10, 2012 – Western Kentucky announces the hiring of Bobby Petrino to replace Willie Taggart as head football coach. The hire was controversial because Petrino, who had been a highly successful coach at U of L from 2003-’06, had been fired at Arkansas due to having an affair with an employee of the athletics department.
Jan. 2, 2013 – Louisville shocks Florida, 33-23, in the prestigious Sugar Bowl for a final 11-2 record in Coach Charlie’s Strong’s third season.
Jan. 13, 2013 – Jurich announces that Strong would be given a $1.4 million annual raise, making him the seventh highest paid college head coach in the nation.
Tom Zurich
Aug. 31, 2013 – In debut at WKU, Petrino’s team upsets Stoops’ first UK team 35-26 in Commonwealth Stadium. Western goes to Sun Bowl and finishes with 8-4 UK; UK finishes 2-10 and does not go to a bowl.
Jan. 5, 2014 – After finishing his fourth season at U of L with a 12-1 record, Strong accepts the Texas head-coaching job for $5 million per year. Soon after, Petrino calls Jurich and requests a meeting.
Jan. 9, 2014 – Petrino is announced as U of L’s head coach for the second time. His base contract calls for $24.5 million over seven years. Some pundits are surprised because Jurich had been openly critical of Petrino for the way he left U of L for the Atlanta Falcons after the 2006 season. However, Jurich says that after meeting with Petrino and his wife for four hours, he is convinced that Petrino has changed his life and deserves a second chance.
Oct. 29, 2014 – Barnhart tears up Stoops’ original contract and gives him a new $21.5 million contract for six years. At the time, UK is 5-3 and coming off an impressive win over South Carolina.
But what went virtually unnoticed at the time was that Barnhart gave the untested coach a $15 million buyout if he was fired before the contract expired. That’s now down to $12 million for Stoops, but his assistants would get $6 million if they didn’t take another job by a certain date, which mean it could amount to an $18 million buyout if Stoops and his staff are fired after the current season.
The Wildcats don’t win another game after Stoops gets his new contract and finished a 5-7 season with a 44-40 road loss to Petrino.2’s first U of L team.
Nov. 28, 2015 – The Wildcats jump out to a 21-0 lead over the Cardinals at home, but U of L storms back for a 38-24 victory that gives the Cats a final 5-7 record and denies them bowl eligibility for the second straight year.
After going through the car wash at Western for a season, Petrino was fair game for anybody who wanted to give him a chance. Some UK diehards urged Barnhart to call him. But apparently that never happened.
If that’s the case, why?
Well, it could be that Barnhart didn’t want a coach who had been at U of L. It could be that Barnhart, a devout member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, disdained Petrino for his sordid past at Arkansas. It could be he knew that Petrino just didn’t like UK, period.
Whatever, it was Jurich who either did the Christian thing or rolled the dice – take your pick – by forgiving Petrino and giving him a second chance. And it was Barnhart who prematurely gave the same amazing buyout to an unproven coach that Les Miles, who has a national title to his credit, has at LSU.
Petrino has a 7-1 career record against UK that surely will grow to 8-1 after this year’s Governor’s Cup game in Louisville. If UK basketball coach John Calipari “owns” Rick Pitino, as Big Blue fans are fond of saying, then Petrino also owns the Wildcats.
It remains to be seen if Petrino will retire at U of L, as he suggested in his initial press conference in 2014, but the Cards look set for the immediate future. At UK, however, the future is a daily topic on sports talk radio. Some are saying that if the Cats don’t beat South Carolina, Stoops should be fired immediately. Others are saying it should happen as season’s end if Stoops doesn’t magically find a way to win at least six games.
Nobody likes to think of UK having to swallow the $18 million or so necessary to get rid of Stoops and his staff. Yet it might be a bargain in the long run if crowds and revenue continues to dwindle. In his fourth year, Stoops has run out of excuses. Even Barnhart can surely understand that.
It was not preordained that either UK or U of L is in the place it occupies now. It’s all a matter of decisions made by athletics directors about coaches over four years.
One more date for the timeline: On March 18, 2016, UK gave Barnhart a contract extension that could keep him in place until June 30, 2022. For reasons unknown, the deal was not announced until four months after it was signed.
Billy Reed is a member of the U.S. Basketball Writers Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, the Kentucky Athletic Hall of Fame and the Transylvania University Hall of Fame. He has been named Kentucky Sports Writer of the Year eight times and has won the Eclipse Award twice. Reed has written about a multitude of sports events for over four decades, but he is perhaps one of media’s most knowledgeable writers on the Kentucky Derby
