FAYETTEVILLE — ‘Tis troubling yet understandable of our college football times that one coach can shout the full monty of “MF” and be supported and another coach shouts “Smile” and is ridiculed.
The winning coach can do or say anything. Well, almost anything. One winning coach stepped over the line last spring learned to his unemployed chagrin.
The losing coach had better say or do nothing deviating from there is nothing to smile about after a 52-0 debacle the week after losing to a 30-point underdog.
Though losing the game 41-17, Bobby Petrino easily won enough games to maintain and even increase Arkansas support despite CBS catching him calling LSU Coach Les Miles the mother of crude profanity.
Petrino closed an outstanding 10-2 regular season in 2011 the day after Thanksgiving with Arkansas losing at LSU.
Between the 11-2 Razorbacks vanquishing Kansas State in the Cotton Bowl and CBS nationally televising Petrino’s potty mouth, Arkansas boosters mostly rose to their coach’s defense. Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long even shifted the blame on CBS for reading Petrino’s lips and showing it while stepping lightly that his coach had said it.
Obviously Long’s light tread accelerated into a final step when Petrino’s conduct so violated University of Arkansas hiring policy that Petrino was terminated last April.
Fast forward to last Monday in Fayetteville and John L. Smith, Petrino’s struggling successor, prefacing his weekly news conference by shouting “Smile.”
Without doubt more Razorbacks fans smiled at Petrino’s curse and cursed Smith’s “smile.”
Some will smile perceiving feistiness from a winning coach cursing a rare defeat.
Arkansans find nothing to smile about when Arkansas loses to Louisiana-Monroe in Little Rock and gets flogged in Fayetteville by Alabama, even if it was just media Smith was exhorting to smile leading into a news conference.
Smith has personally had to grin and bear it through tough times on the field and off. His failed real estate ventures bankrupted him minus $24 million from his assets, it was revealed Wednesday in court documents.
Enthusiastic optimism, even if sometimes goofily enthusiastic optimism like before that Monday news conference, is Smith’s M.O.
It can make him appear the fool, especially in our YouTube society where it seems we seek to capitalize on most everybody’s foolishness.
However, before dismissing Smith as a fool, it should be noted that Bobby Petrino doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
As a young assistant, Petrino served under Smith, now 63, at three different schools and then hired him as an Arkansas assistant in 2009.
Paul Petrino, Bobby’s brother and Arkansas’ offensive coordinator, also assisted Smith at Idaho, Utah State and Louisville.
Neither would willingly follow a fool.
Sure, Smith was initially hired at Arkansas in part to be the good cop to Bobby Petrino’s bad cop. That good cop part worked well given the players’ standing ovation for Smith upon him being named head coach.
But there’s more. Anybody who has seen Bobby Petrino operate knows he won’t tolerate an assistant coach who can’t seriously coach.
That’s the side of John L. Smith that Smith seriously needs Arkansas to see.
Sports, Pages 20 on 09/22/2012