‘Imagine being this desperate.’ FCS school mocked for hiring Bobby Petrino.
Bobby Petrino on Wednesday was revealed to be the new head football coach at Missouri State University, a member of the NCAA’s Football Championship Subdivision. The claws came out across the country.
Bruce Feldman, a national college football reporter for The Athletic, alluded to Petrino’s final season at Louisville — and the Cardinals’ subsequent hire of Scott Satterfield following that 2-10 campaign — when the hire at MSU became official.
“Hopefully for this program, they’ll have some Scott Satterfield type guy waiting in the wings to pump some life back into the place after Petrino guts it,” Feldman wrote on Twitter.
Sports Illustrated’s Pat Forde, a Louisville resident who worked at the Courier-Journal before becoming a national columnist, wrote of the hire: “Missouri State is the latest in a long line of places willing to have his tenure end badly on its watch.”
Leading up to Petrino’s hire there were conflicting reports that Art Briles, whose tenure at Baylor ended in disgrace stemming from a team-wide sexual assault scandal, would be named the head coach at Missouri State. Jason Kersey, a Oklahoma beat reporter for The Athletic, indicated that between the two, Petrino was a more defendable hire. “Not even close,” he wrote.
Jason Kirk, a blogger for Banner Society, joked that Missouri State should have hired actor John Goodman instead of Petrino. “Then everybody would like them and not hate them,” Kirk wrote.
