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The ACC Question of the week is back with our esteemed friend and college football writer @MattZemek, Editor at @TrojansWire .
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Some questions are meant to elicit direct yes-or-no answers… and then there’s this question about Louisville Cardinals head coach Scott Satterfield.
It has been exposed that Satterfield did indeed interview with South Carolina — in a pandemic, in a second season which has gone noticeably wrong, after all the emotional exhaustion Louisville has been through due to the instability in its revenue-sport programs and the failed leadership of Bobby Petrino, who mentally checked out and didn’t give players his best effort at the end of his second go-round as UL’s coach.
Are you kidding me?
Louisville believed in Scott Satterfield. Louisville trusted Scott Satterfield. The Cardinals and athletic director Vince Tyra gave Satterfield his big break, a Power Five job, after he worked in the salt mines at Appalachian State.
We could make an allowance for a situation in which a megabucks program came calling — think of Texas, which is trying to land Urban Meyer right now — but Texas comes calling only if a coach is hitting a home run.
Scott Satterfield isn’t even hitting a single in this 2020 season. He has struck out… and he interviewed at SOUTH CAROLINA?
Come on.
I know: It’s a pandemic season with all sorts of dislocations and disruptions. I’m not going to use 2020 as a reason to offer a fresh verdict on coaches who are trying to get settled at their current programs. The 2020 season is affirming previous verdicts about coaches who had already reached their expiration date in 2019 — Gus Malzahn at Auburn, Clay Helton at USC, and so on — but I’m not going to use this season to declare that a first- or second-year coach is not the right fit for a job. I’ll wait for 2021 and a 12-game season to render those verdicts.
Nevertheless, Satterfield hasn’t found the magic touch this season. Dave Doeren at North Carolina State, Dave Clawson at Wake Forest, and Bronco Mendenhall at Virginia have all done noticeably good work… and that doesn’t include Brian Kelly, the likely ACC Coach of the Year at Notre Dame.
What coach interviews with SOUTH CAROLINA when struggling to rebuild Louisville — in a pandemic, in Year 2 of his tenure? Doesn’t Satterfield — or any other coach in his position — have to successfully rebuild his first Power Five program before seeking greener pastures? Doesn’t a coach need to seek an upward move if he is going to entertain any ideas of leaving? South Carolina is NOT an upward move from Louisville. This doesn’t even need an explanation, given how obvious the matter is.
What went on in Scott Satterfield’s mind to lead him to do this? It’s crazy, and the really disillusioning aspect of this for Louisville fans is that it reflects the exact same restless mercenary mentality of the man Cardinal fans were so relieved to have pushed out the door: Bobby Petrino, who constantly flirted with other schools to beef up his contracts when coaching college football.
Will Satterfield’s interview with South Carolina hurt him? “Yes or no” is not adequate in sizing up this situation. What really matters is that Satterfield has already infuriated his own fan base, and he has likely undercut his relationship with his players, some of them having a connection to the miserable end of the second Petrino term in Louisville.
Does Scott Satterfield use this moment to reset his priorities and change how he goes about his business… or will he not learn from this?
There is also a highly cynical view to apply here: Much as Bobby Petrino being a jerk and a liar didn’t really hurt his coaching career — he got an NFL job, he got the Arkansas job on the rebound from the Atlanta Falcons, and he got a second go-round at Louisville AFTER his Arkansas scandal — it could be that Scott Satterfield could have something akin to the career Bobby Petrino had.
It wouldn’t be right, but it is common to see people get rewarded for being jerks, as long as they can win. That still COULD be Scott Satterfield’s career.
Of this much, however, we can be certain: Scott Satterfield will be under ENORMOUS pressure to win in 2021, wherever he coaches. If he flops, his career WILL be in big trouble, and that is probably the most relevant thing we can take away from all of this.
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