Where Did It Go Wrong?

[racehorseowner]

I am looking for some factual answers to this question: How does a team go in two years from a potential college playoff team with a Heisman winner at QB to a 2 win team with one of the worst defenses I have ever seen? Also, how long will it take to get back to winning (not sure about the talent on the team now and among recruits coming in).

My admittedly uninformed view is that the staff around Petrino was incompetent, beginning with his son and son in laws, and this damaged recruiting and play.

 

[KerryRhodes]

January 9, 2014

 

[CardinalJim]

January 9, 2014

All downhill from there. Those saying you can’t get rid of a coach because of one bad season don’t realize this season is a culmination of a mediocre at best 2nd tenure at UofL

 

[NukeCard]

Nuclear explosion of UL Leadership. People work for people...not institutions....CBP was the last man standing from the old regime. All of that affected his enthusiam, motivation and drive. Couple that with the loss of his father....

 

[STLNBSE]

I think it went wrong once Bobby 2.0 started losing every assistant he had. Grantham and Cort were the kiss of death.

 

[Thecycle27]

This go around he surrounded himself with ass kissers not coaches that would hold him accountable or do the dirty work i.e. Disciplining kids. The coaches that pushed him were let go or shown the door. Kids really don't mind a HC that is an jerk, but he better be a jerk to everyone. Him and his staff tore that locker in half which all started with a lack of team discipline.

 

[PushupMan]

I happen to believe that Petrino mortgaged the future in terms of roster choices to try to win an ACC title in 2016 or 2017. The current talent level, while down slightly from 2016-17 levels, is underperforming primarily due to poor QB play, low numbers in the top 2 classes, and a lack of motivation. The loss to FSU was absolutely devastating, and broke the spirit of both the team and the coaches.

UofL’s ACC schedule is not so difficult ... year in and year out Syracuse, BC, Wake Forest, Virginia, and NC State aren’t so formidable that a great head coaching hire cannot get us back into bowl contention in one or two years.

 

[PRPclass76]

The exact date Kerry said. I said then and still believe it now, Tommy J rehired him so he could spend the entire presser yelling at him.

 

[LuvCards]

The downward spiral actually began last year. Remember the last three games in 2017 - all loses. Then Lamar leaves early. I think the last two seasons were all because of Lamar's talent. Bad hires in assistants, coupled with undisciplined players does not go very far.

 

[GoldCard]

These are the facts, from what I’ve been able to observe from afar:

1) Bobby Petrino has a great football mind.
2) Bobby Petrino has an abrasive personality and demands a lot from people.
3) Generally speaking, most people stop caring about #1 because of #2 when things aren’t going well, which brings us to...
4) Bobby Petrino quits when things aren’t going well, possibly because he’s impatient.

Evidence for fact #4? He signed with Atlanta and impatiently quit when things got tough. His quarterback was thrown in prison and the losses piled up. He impatiently took the first decent job opening when patience could’ve gotten him Matt Ryan and a real shot at a Super Bowl, or the Auburn job, which opened up a year later.

Further evidence for #4 was the complete change in attitude in the UofL team after the Clemson loss on 2016. Attitude reflects leadership, so I have to assume it trickled down from the top. Instead of being patient with the rankings and playing inspired football for the rest of the season, Bobby began complaining about the rankings and this was reflected by the team’s attitude in the remaining games.

The wheels came off completely at the end of this year’s Florida State game. Once he made that boneheaded decision to put the ball in the air when all we needed was to soak up time and kick a field goal, most of the team lost all respect for him.

 

[Hampton Roads 6]

Petrino was a bad hire. Great offensive mind, but that's it.

 

[CardX]

The question was where did it go wrong, not when. The answer is Houston, Texas.

 

[HoptownCat93]

But without Bobby...Lamar doesn't come....and you don't have that game against FSU w/ Gameday.....you don't have the Clemson matchup where you guys were so close to being #1....and you don't host gameday a 2nd year in a row.

The timing was right to fire him...but would you give up that run w/ Lamar and playoff contention if it meant you never hired Bobby?

 

[glassmanJ]

imho, bobby was focused solely on making lamar the heismann winner and an nfl qb and didn't pay attention to much else. our defense has never been good but lamar overcame all those problems. our o line wasn't good, and while our d line could be good we had no reserves to back up anyone who started. on top of that, besides players star rating being overblown, with hys past issues, i truly believe many parents and kids never even considered us so our pool to choose from is about half. simply, lamar overcame recruiting problems for basically three years. while he was awesome, we all overlooked everything that was going on. the end started the day he signed lamar. petrino's greatest achievement led to his downfall.

 

[ahhculdee]

You fired Jeff Brohm.

 

[nccardfan]

imho, bobby was focused solely on making lamar the heismann winner and an nfl qb and didn't pay attention to much else. our defense has never been good but lamar overcame all those problems. our o line wasn't good, and while our d line could be good we had no reserves to back up anyone who started. on top of that, besides players star rating being overblown, with hys past issues, i truly believe many parents and kids never even considered us so our pool to choose from is about half. simply, lamar overcame recruiting problems for basically three years. while he was awesome, we all overlooked everything that was going on. the end started the day he signed lamar. petrino's greatest achievement led to his downfall.

I’m of the opinion that LJ was so talented and improvised so much that Bobby couldn’t really design plays for the offense. If he did, it went out of the window because the oline couldn’t hold their blocks and all the false starts. It was “let’s see what LJ does this time”

 

[CTownCard]

The seeds of every failure of leadership, be it CEOs, Generals, Politicians and Coaches are often based on what made them successful previously. Douglas McArhur’s tactitical mind and boldness freed the Phippines and cut the North Korean army in two, but his bluster almost started WW3. Nixon’s political mastermind ascended him to the presidency, his desire to control everything sucked him into Watergate. IMHO I think Bobby was over dependent on his Offensive Genius, what worked for awhile became standard fare in college football and defense adjusted (with exception of LJ). Thus he never worried about building a defense or a sustainable culture. I’ll just out score them. Plus he may have been successful in 1.0 and Arkansas with his mannerisms but the inability to adapt dooms us all.

 

[CardHack]

I don't think you get to the historical cliff we fell off to the level we did this year without a cause-and-effect; it was so bad that you can't pin it on one cause but an accumulation of many.
A. When Petrino was hired I was under a number of impressions, one of which was Jurich himself lost patience with the options post-Charlie that he went to a Petrino he knew he had by the negotiating short curlies...going into the ACC he had to have a quality coach and an experienced coach. Truth be told that first staff Petrino assembled was a pretty good one, with the type of immediate impact recruiting connections a guy like him needs to be successful. Defensively Grantham Exhibit A who brought his brother (a good D.C. coupled with a good position coach of a brother). Terrell Buckley a good position coach who would leave us for MS State and his connections on the Panhandle. Cort Dennison was a grad assistant with that entire group. With each loss of position coach they were replaced by a lesser coach than they succeeded. They were coordinated by incompetents in Sirmon and Van Gorder who had staffers under them not hired to their systems.

B. Petrino is many things, but I would think in a living room about as dynamic as dripping oatmeal. Forget the numbers and think need. You can be ranked in the Top 30, but if that is built on reasonably coveted players at every position but where you really need it? What quality HS defensive lineman was recruited during his watch? In my mind maybe GG Robinson. Perhaps Greenard. That's two in five years. You need a minimum of four in two years. The math caught up with us this year, which was a concern I voiced loudly when Antwan Odom headed to Starkville with Grantham. Hell the end result is I'm pretty sure the Special Olympics would be able to run offtackle against us.
So you don't have either talent or depth in your defensive front; and the fact you had neither to be coached by general incompetence gave you the ick you had in 2018. For me this will go down as the Year of Ick.

C. So worse yet, you have neither talent, or depth and your one reasonably high quality Defensive linemen gets hurt in the first half of your first game. They blow the Florida State game. Their answer is to Quit. The only thing that salvaged an outright complete right off after that was two short field turnovers up in Chestnut Hill which did nothing more than keep them from getting 50+ like everybody else. The fact is they quit somewhere in the week going into Georgia Tech.

D. In any other year experienced by Petrino he was able to ultimately generate something offensively; in Year 1 in 2.0 he inherited GREAT defensive talent and I don't use that term loosely. They shutdown Clemson at Clemson and knocked out Watson. Our safety play was historically good with Sample and Holliman. We had good corners. We had good linebackers. We had good defensive ends and defensive tackles. We were well schemed....but we were average at quarterback especially due to Parker's losing half a seaon. We slog along with different quarterbacks until Parker got back and things opened up.

...this season that quarterback play never materialized and we remained trapped between the offense we had with Lamar Jackson, and the offense we wanted for the first five year Petrino coached here. It seems subtle, but it isn't easy bouncing back-and-forth between a direct between the tackles drive/zone blocking approach and the quick hitting/quick engagement and peel downfield approach of a zone read offense we enjoyed with Jackson. Personnel changes on the offensive line are incremental changes; ours was forced to be different from one quarter to the next going from Puma to Malik to Jordan Travis to whoever else. Above all else, none of them were efficient with what was unquestionably the one clear personnel strength preseason and that was our receiving corps. Honestly when it comes to quitting, I sort of got the sense that the receiving corps was first.

E. Truth be told, our issues didn't start when Petrino was hired though some root causes were there; I think our problems didn't even materialize when we got beat by Houston. I think the "leadership" deemed missing offensively started immediately after the Clemson game in 2016; I thought our mindset with being just outside the BCS playoff rankings and being pilloried week after week on ESPN by Joey Galloway, Booger McFarland and some of your classic neophytes from the SEC during their BCS Playoff release rankings caught up with some of our kids, and Jaylen Smith's Twitter account weekly was my only evidence. I thought they were spending a hell of alot of time defending themselves instead of taking matters into their own hands. They limped through Duke, UVa where they were miraculously let off the hook and Wake Forest in particular...and either dropped a hell of alot of passes or fumbled the football at historic volumes along the way. They didn't play their way back into reasonable discussion; they clearly played their way out of it despite jaw dropping performances against NC State and BC. I thought that demonstrated a tremendous lack of overall maturity and it continued until the game the other night.