The Jerk Store Called. They've Got Your New Coach.

In an age of jerkdom, do we want our coaches to be insufferable?

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(Author’s Note: I wrote this before the news broke of Curt Cignetti’s contract extension at Indiana. But the larger point still stands—in fact, it almost reinforces the point. Jerks are gonna jerk.)

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I.

Let us now recite the perverse gospel of Bobby Petrino:

This is a man who, in 2003, clandestinely interviewed for the head coaching job at Auburn while he was the head coach at Louisville, and while Auburn still had a football coach. That coach, Tommy Tuberville—who now cosplays as perhaps the dumbest Senator in the modern history of the American experiment—had actually hired Petrino as his offensive coordinator, which was what enabled Petrino to get hired at Louisville. And then he nearly pulled a Shakespearean double-cross.

But let’s not stop there, because this is also a man who then angled for and failed to get the head-coaching job at LSU, and then became the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons in 2007, where he lasted 13 games before deciding he wasn’t into this NFL thing at all. So he left a four-sentence laminated note in the lockers of his players and bolted for the University of Arkansas.

And then came this:

That is the iconic image of Petrino’s career, from a press conference he held at Arkansas in 2012 in the wake of a motorcycle crash. What Petrino didn’t say that day, and that reporters found out later, was that he wasn’t alone on that motorcycle; he was with a 25-year-old employee of his own athletic department, with whom he was having an affair.

Arkansas fired him right away, but he was apparently such a brilliant football mind that Western Kentucky hired him a few months later. Then somehow—despite concerns that he’d apparently cut corners with players during his first tenure at Louisville—the school hired him again, where he shepherded the career of Lamar Jackson for a couple of seasons and then wore out his welcome once more. So he bounced around to several schools, wound up as an offensive coordinator at Arkansas, and when Arkansas fired head coach Sam Pittman as head coach last month, Petrino wound up as the interim head coach at the same school that he’d once publicly embarrassed, with a real shot at becoming the permanent head coach.

I’m not sure if there’s ever been a bigger scoundrel in the history of college football than Bobby Petrino. And yet here we are. It is 2025, and America is at war with itself, and the jerks are back in charge.

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II.

The first thing that happens when a coach gets fired is that the lists begin to proliferate. Most of the time, these are utterly speculative compilations of names drummed up by writers and outside observers as a way of capturing our attention. And so last weekend, when my alma mater, Penn State, fired its head coach, James Franklin, the lists proliferated, and some of them were based on educated guesses, and some of them were random and stupid, including one I came across that included the name of Jon Gruden.

The thing is, we know by now what Jon Gruden is. He was an entertaining television personality, a hit-and-miss coach, and a man who apparently was comfortable forwarding racist and misogynistic tropes for years before he finally got caught. I think it’s safe to say that Jon Gruden is an unrepentant jerk, and I don’t particularly want my alma mater to be coached by a bigoted creep—the fact that people even continue to float his name probably says something about how far we’ve sunk as a culture.

Say what you will about James Franklin—he could be paranoid and neurotic and controlling, but he was at least not an overt jerk. But I wonder if that’s exactly what a lot of my fellow alums do want—if they’ve been conditioned to presume that the only way to follow up the tenure of a coach who perhaps wasn’t enough of a jerk is to embrace the jerkiness of it all.

We are at an interesting juncture in the era of coaching, in part because we are at interesting juncture in American history. Over the course of a decade, we have become so inured to the notion that only a jerk can run the country that we elected one of the biggest jerks in modern American history not just once, but twice. We tried a nice guy in-between, but no one seemed happy with that, so we decided to retreat back to the jerk store again and try an authoritarian leisure suit on for size. And now I wonder if half the country just takes for granted that we need a jerk leading us in order to win.

Which brings me to a man named Curt Cignetti.

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III.

There seems to be little doubt that Cignetti, the head coach at Indiana University, is kind of a jerk. He projects a defiant arrogance in nearly all of his public appearances; he once got so fed up with people asking him why he could build the Indiana program into a national contender that he told a reporter, “It’s pretty simple, I win. Google me.”

This is where it gets interesting, because Cignetti has proven, over the course of a year-and-a-half at Indiana, that he actually does win. He is 17-2 at Indiana, his team won at Oregon last week and appears primed to make the College Football Playoff for the second consecutive year. And that leads one to wonder whether part of the reason Cignetti wins is because he’s a jerk. Is performative arrogance a necessary element of winning? Is Cignetti actually a jerk behind the scenes, or is he playing a jerk on television?

Cignetti’s name is (was) now in the mix to become the next head coach at Penn State. The other favorite would appear to be Nebraska coach Matt Rhule, a genial guy who grew up a few miles from campus and played at Penn State, but who many believe is somehow too soft to actually win a championship. And so Cignetti feels (felt) like a legitimate possibility, given that he spent much of his career coaching in the state of Pennsylvania (as opposed to some random attempt by the Internet to resurrect the skeletal remains of Jon Gruden’s career).

Cignetti is not the only jerk on the shortlists I’ve seen—there is also LSU coach Brian Kelly, and Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin (who is more trickster than jerk)—but Cignetti feels (felt) like the strongest jerk-like potential hire of the bunch. And I don’t know how I feel about taking sides with any guy who seems to believe that being an asshole is a fundamental element of one’s success. I honestly don’t know how it would affect me if I am forced to filter the last vestiges of purity of my college football fandom through the lens of a jackass.

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IV.

Maybe you can argue that the relationship between coaching and assholishness is slightly different in professional sports, because dealing with jerks feels like an inevitable part of life in the real world. Everyone has a jerk for a boss when they graduate from college; it’s almost a rite of passage. When I moved to California, I became a 49ers fan, though I had to wait to fully fall in until the jerkish presence of Jim Harbaugh had been scrubbed from the franchise. But now, I find myself held captive to current 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan, who is unquestionably a jerk.

Do I like Kyle Shanahan? Would I want to converse with him over a Miller High Life? Would I want to play for him and feel as if I am constantly failing at everything I do? No, I would not. But I understand the relationship is different; I understand that professional football is more fundamentally devoid of empathy than college football. And I know that college football and professional football are continuing their ongoing cultural merger in the NIL era, but I guess I’m still a romantic.

Look, college football history is littered with coaches who were, and are, utter jerks. The greatest coach in modern history, Nick Saban, could be a jerk at times, but as he got older, his jerkiness felt more and more crafted. He understood that he could channel his jerkiness merely to motivate his team; he became more comfortable with his own insecurities. And yet, if you are so inclined, you could also argue that this is why he lost his edge—that he became less of a jerk in an era where the culture was beginning to embrace a heightened sense of jerkiness.

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V.

There are a multitude of problems in America right now, but I think you can make the case that the next few years will center around one fundamental question: Can only a jerk or a disciple of a jerk actually possess the jerkish wherewithal to solve those problems, or can we actually embrace someone who embraces optimism and positivity and isn’t also viewed as an effusive weakling?

On a more microcosmal level, I suppose that’s what we’re dealing with at Penn State: The nice guy failed, and what comes next is unclear. Do you insist that only an asshole can put you over the top, or do you still believe, in an era where scumbags and creeps command the discourse (and where only performative jerkish mockery appears capable of humbling them), that jerkishness is not a prerequisite for winning?

I wish I could say the answer was clear. Things are ugly and cruel and loud and I don’t know anymore—maybe the only way to cut through the noise is to do the wrong thing every step of the way, because it might lead you straight to the top.

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