There are plenty of days when I don’t like myself. Days where my tongue is too sharp, my judgment too keen and my patience running three quarters low. Days where I fume at others for having the gall to slow me down with their own issues and peculiarities. Days when I push my selfishness on those I love particularly because they’re the people I love.
I’m probably a lot like you.
This isn’t the stuff we talk about. Especially not today, not here in 2025, when we can perfectly curate the image we show the world. We can be good spouses and good parents, we can be killing it at work, and we can always hit the gym with regularity. All it takes is a few pictures and a few clicks, and if the demands of crafting the perfect image leads to a few sleepless nights, why, we can just airbrush those bags right out from under our eyes.
Fourteen years ago, as head coach of the Arkansas football program, Bobby Petrino committed sins that couldn’t be airbrushed away. And, as his unlikely redemption arc as interim head coach for the Razorbacks ends, I’m going to miss the hell out of him.
Petrino was pried open for all of Arkansas to see. An entire state knows the story by heart. Four years after starting a giddy run in Fayetteville that brought the Razorbacks football program to heights never before seen in SEC competition, Petrino cut his own legs out from under him in the most public of fashions — adultery, professional malfeasance, lies and a neck brace.
I’m thrilled that certain skeletons will remain in my closet, but Petrino never had the luxury of storing his shame. In every stop made en route to his improbable full-circle return to Fayetteville, Petrino had to answer for his worst moment as a man not just with the media but surely in every job interview he has had or ever will have.
You want to talk about courage? Petrino didn’t exactly flee under the cover of darkness. Considered momentarily toxic even by the win-at-all-costs ethos of Division I college football, Petrino’s immediate post-Razorbacks life consisted of sharing a house with his wife, Becky, and performing triage on a broken marriage.
Imagine that for a moment. No team to coach, nothing to lose yourself in, just day after day of telling hard truths and asking forgiveness of the person you hurt the most. No promise of ever coaching again. I have tried to imagine what those raw and real weeks and months were like for Petrino, and it is hard.
Coaching can be the noblest of professions, but it is also filled to the brim with scrubbed-and-polished go-getters with meticulously crafted public images. They arrive with hardly a hair out of place, speaking in platitudes about hard work and victories ahead. But we’re missing something if we don’t recognize and embrace the inevitable self-inflicted scars and punctures that come with life.
I’m glad time has healed the wounds left between Petrino and the Arkansas fan base 14 years ago, and I hope he is welcomed at the next stop on his journey. He deserves all this and more — not because of his X’s and O’s acumen but because of his example. Because he was stupid and selfish and awful, just like we are. Because he reminds us that we are rarely the sum of what we show the world.
Like many of us, I will end today thinking about where I erred. Where I was too brusque, too self-absorbed and just plain too much. Could I have been kinder? More patient? More generous? I’ll go to bed with guilt and shame over what happened today and what happened years ago, and I’ll wake up tomorrow with my teeth bared against every bit of that shame and regret, determined to be just a little bit of a better version of myself. Because the alternative is awful.
Even if we lose all we value to our own hand, we get to move forward. It may be all we’ve got some days, but string enough of those days together, and there’s no telling how far it can take you.
Bobby Petrino woke up the next morning, and he moved forward. May we all be so brave.
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