You obviously were looking too closely, and not listening to what was said.
It was made very clear that he wasn’t fired for having an affair: he was fired for 1) giving the girl a job and 2) repeatedly lying to his bosses.
Any other organization worth a damn, including an NFL team, would do the same.
It’s much easier to get another job after torching your bridges in college than in the NFL. There are 32 NFL teams and most of them, maybe all of them, would be strongly biased against Petrino for the way he ditched the Falcons. There are 120 Division I teams in the NCAA, and about half of those are in the BCS conferences.
The lady already had a job at the University of Arkansas. Petrino got her a different job in HIS department.
And he proceeded to lie to his bosses until the State Police report was about to reveal the truth.
Nothing in his actions gives any room for any benefit of the doubt.
Maybe it’s a generation thing or a blindly-loyal to the Razorbacks thing, but none of my high school classmates thinks Petrino deserves any shot. This includes UA alums and employees. He blew his only shot by lying to his bosses repeatedly. I haven’t asked my brother yet about it (UA alum and die-hard Hogs fan), but I can’t see him defending Petrino very hard, either.
As for his shot at an NFL gig? I doubt he’ll get an HC job. He burned that bridge when he left Atlanta in the lurch 13 games into his lousy, first season. And given his now public propensity for lying to his bosses and the NFLs own current problems with coaches behaving badly, I’m not sure Goodell will look kindly on any team hiring him.
But, as John Calipari and Todd Graham have shown, there are plenty of other college programs willing to take a shot on a questionable coach if it means wins.
The most reliable road back seems to go like this: take a job at a smaller school that is happy to have a big-name coach on rental, build up their program for a few years and achieve a modest degree of success, and then be welcomed back to a big-name school with open arms.
Did he lie or did he just not mention it? Honestly, if I told my boss I would be missing work because I was in an accident, I would never even think to mention that I had a passenger who was not injured at all, whether or not I was fucking her.
Yeah, he lied. About a lot of things.
When he hired her, he neglected to mention to any of his bosses that he had any sort of relationship with her or that he gave her a $20,000 “gift”.
While that’s not an out-and-out falsehood, withholding information about a conflict of interest in hiring decisions is at the very least misleading.
As for the accident, his initial story was that he was at the lake with his wife. Also, he only vaguely mentioned that there was a “lady” who tried to flag cars for help. At least that’s the story he gave the press and presumably the higher ups at UA.
That story changed when the Arkansas State Police were about to release the accident report.
He quickly changed stories and let the AD and others know that he had a passenger with whom he’d been having a relationship. Also, that the whole story about spending the evening at the lake with his wife was bogus.
In the report, Petrino was also noted to have asked if he needed to give the passenger’s name for the police, which means he was already in spin control mode when the cops showed up.
Oh, I don’t think ANY profssional team will be in a hurry to hire Petrino, who completely pissed off the Falcons’ players and owner in his tenure as head coach.
He commands almost NO respect in the NFL.
A wealthy booster offered the young woman in question a first-class ticket out of Arkansas to escape the media, but she turned it down, saying “I only ride coach.”
The AD had no choice but to fire Petrino. There were 159 applicants for the job and the chick he was fucking got hired. 158 potential lawsuits.
And, according to these articles from Sports Illustrated, he gamed the hiring system, and exaggerated his mistress’s qualifications, to get her that job.
The guy’s a tremendous jerk, and a carpetbagger. Unfortunately, he’s also proven to be a successful football coach, which means that he will, undoubtedly, find some sucker program willing to give him another chance.
And after getting another lucrative coaching spot, chances are he will find another hott 20-something piece of ass to cornhole as well…
Yeah, this is unquestionably an offense that would get anybody fired. It’s dishonest and selfish, it shows disregard for the program Petrino was supposed to be leading, and it does leave the school vulnerable to a bunch of lawsuits. Rick Pitino didn’t get fired when his affair came to light a few years ago, but he didn’t do anything like this.