re: I see it now... the stink of petrino

I'm really on the fence about Petrino. On one hand, we had our two best seasons since the late '80s under him. On the other hand, we all inwardly knew that there was no way Petrino could last here until retirement before doing something characteristically douchebaggy, and predictably, our program tanked when that did happen.

Bielema came into a tough situation. He's a defensive-minded coach who is inheriting a defense from a guy who only even recruited defensive players because the rules state you need 11 guys on the field while the other team has the ball. The offensive philosophy is also a complete 180 degrees in difference. Combine both of these with the fact that we compete in the strongest division of the strongest conference in CFB, and I'm seriously struggling to think of a realistic and plausible situation that could somehow be worse.

We all want to believe that we're better off without Petrino; that we didn't get rid of the Golden Goose, and seeing debacles like this help with that. I know we've choked away two winnable games this year, so I can't be too harsh on Bobby. But come on. 21-0 is a pretty sound lead to blow, #2 team or not. Even though I'm hoping that Bielema is the one to lead the program, it's far from hope believing that Petrino was never going to win us an SEC Championship. The SEC is just too hard for his style of play when you couple that with the fact that his personality couldn't allow him to recruit for shite.

All of this would be so much easier for the more critical people to accept if we had fired Petrino after he finally had an 8-5 season - which probably would have been 2012. But of course, he got fired after going 11-2 and after trending upward every year for four years, so naturally the idiots think he was going to continue to do so until he reached 14-0 and won a NC.

Nonetheless, I'm grateful for the life he breathed into a program that was decimated by years of underachieving with Houston Nutt.