Koya said:
Knowing what you know, would you hire Petrino for one of the most essential positions within your company - one that will make or break your company's performance both short and especially long term?
It's a good question and it's a fair question. My viewpoint is this
A) Anyone comparing Petrino or any head coach/potential head coach in college and pro sports to the average American work grunt is really making an apples and oranges argument. I think people make the assumption that coaching has less of an attrition/filtering process than pro athletes do. Consider for a head coaching candidate, his bread and butter is practical experience. Unlike many prestigious jobs out there, there is no "school" you can go to for learning the stock and trade. The natural order of competition also filters out candidates. Successful coordinators get esteem and are recategorized as blue chip coaching prospects, but only at the cost of making many many many more coordinators look bad in the process. There just aren't many candidates out there period for these elite jobs. If I needed a manager in a corporate level job, well there are tons of candidates out there. If I needed a head coach of a relatively elite college team?
Would I hire Petrino to manage a factory? Maybe not. Would I hire Petrino to manage my elite football team, even with his current situation? Maybe. He's working against a much smaller pool of candidates and his skill set is probably very very unique given his industry. (It has to be unique for him to have survived and moved up to be a head coach in the first place)
B) At some level, with even the most prestigious jobs, it is still evolves to a management job. Plenty of cops become captains and chiefs. Plenty of doctors become administrators. Plenty of engineers become bureaucrats. Plenty of any job makes you a manager more than the job you trained for in the first place. Why is a head coaching position any different. Many cops don't actually do police work anymore, they manage other cops. Plenty of head coaches don't actually coach anymore, they manage other coaches. Often they manage coordinators who manage other lower level coaches. And those coaches do much coaching? Or do they simply try to refine what college coaches have taught, which was a refinement of what high school coaches have taught. I can rise through the ranks based on my coaching prowess, but at some point, I'm just another manager. Am I any good at managing? I could be the best engineer in the world, but rising up through my skill and accomplishments, I might be a lousy leader. Oppenheimer did some teaching once, one of the greatest minds ever in human history, and he was openly considered a pretty lousy college professor.
Petrino probably did not fail in terms of his technical football coaching, he most likely failed to handle a more elevated form of management. More pressure, more money, bigger stakes, more press, more stress, more complications.
People wonder why Herm Edwards still has a job. He might be a lousy technical coach ( Of that I'm almost certain. Yes, I am an Oakland Raiders fan. Yes I took a shot at the KC Chiefs. Someone please restrain Kevin Ashcraft before he lobbies to get me banned here) but maybe he's a pretty decent manager of coaches and players.
C) Petrino's one true Ace card was something that could have made him a great short to long term hire. Petrino is at a clear disadvantage compared to heavily experienced NFL coordinators. His learning curve must be faster and more precise. More must go right than go wrong. But Petrino's bread and butter should have been the draft. Bill Walsh and Jimmy "Helmet Head" Johnson are considered the most successful college to pro coaching transitions. Both were great with personnel and drafting within their systems. Jimmy Johnson didn't just watch film, he probably recruited and knew and saw alot of those Cowboy draftees that built his dynasty. There is no excuse, none whatsoever, for a recent college coach who jumped the pros to ever have a bad draft. Not one excuse ever. That coach had the most recent and up close intel of anyone, even over many pro coaches. Obviously Petrino did not last long enough to see the fruition of multiple drafts regarding players in his college coaching frame of reference.
Would I hire Petrino as a long term prospect? Well part of his job is to stock me with good personnel. Personnel that he has face time and game time with and against. That raw intel is very powerful. Powerful enough to sink me or raise me up. How many people can give you that kind of intel? I mean true intel within context and perspective? I'm not talking Mel Kiper Jr here, I'm talking real trigger time. Again, apples and oranges, Petrino comes from a very limited pool that's been heavily filtered.
The Petrino issue, at some level, is really a personnel issue given the context of the industry in question with it's limitations and needs. Would I hire him? Maybe I would. Do you assume we got the whole truth? (This is sports journalism we are talking about here, is there any profession that's taken a nosedive in perception of integrity more than journalists and the general news media in the last few decades? I would rather piss on an ax murderer set on fire than a sports journalist set on fire. If it's Peter King, I'll just dump his coffee on his charcoaled carcass. ) I don't believe we got the whole truth.
How many times have we, as regular guys, been in work situations where the perception of reality screwed us when the truth, the truth we knew would never see the light of day, was an entirely different ballgame?
At the end of the day, Petrino didn't work out in Atlanta. Hell, Angry Bill didn't work out for the Browns did he? All the issue tells us is Petrino wasn't a good fit for Atlanta, nothing more, nothing less.
Michael Vick probably danced in his living room naked covered in jam when he found out about CameraGate. Robert Kraft probably did the Electric Slide when he found out Sean Taylor got clipped. And soon Bobby Petrino will probably do the Ickey Shuffle when the next sad sordid NFL topic the day pushes him to the back page of the sports section. Or how many of you remember that Latrell Sprewell choked his coach? Jason Williams blew someone away with a shotgun? Wade Boggs used to tote his mistress around on the Red Sox's away trips?
The only truth is Bobby Petrino is a coward this week. Next week it will be someone else's turn. And the Falcons will still need a new head coach regardless of what Petrino does or says or how he is ultimately perceived.
The Petrino issue will move on.
And so should we.