RUN AWAY!!!

Item: Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long fired stellar Arkansas football coach Bobby Petrino, the married father of four, for having an affair with Jessica Dorrell with a comely 25-year-old subordinate and lying through his teeth about it to Long and the University of Arkanasa. Commenting on the scandal, ESPN’s Calvin Cowherd described Petrino as a “great football coach.”

Wrong.

Item: In White Plains, NY., Jessica Vega, 25, has been indicted on charges of fraud and grand larceny for falsely claiming that she was dying of leukemia to inspire her friends and the community to donate money, gifts and services to her for her”dream wedding” in 2010. Later, her husband, Michale O’Connell,  discovered that the doctor’s letter she used as a prop was fake, and he divorced her. Now he’s living with her again, in Virginia, and the couple has had a second child. “She’s a good mom,” O’Connell explained.

Even more wrong.

We see this mistake all the time: observers separate core character and trustworthiness from an individual’s job performance. That cannot and should not be done, and to do it is dangerous and irresponsible.

Bobby Petrino, whose record since being hired at Arkansas had indeed been remarkable, is a miserable college coach, and not just because he is an untrustworthy and dishonest employee. In the incident that led to his dismissal,  he conducted an inappropriate on-campus relationship with a woman, who was not his wife, and who Petrino had personally added to his football staff. Petrino did not disclose he was in a relationship with the woman when he hired her, raising various issues including misuse of University funds, and after he hired her, sexual-harassment.The two were in motorcycle accident, and Petrino attempted a cover-up by calling a friend in law enforcement, leaving the scene with his mistress,  insisting to university administrators that she was not on the motorcycle with him at the time of the crash, and maintaining the lie that there was no relationship between them.   He called a press conference to “clear the air” about the accident, and continued the falsehood.

As Arkansas knew when it hired him away from the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, Petino had a long, long record of untruthfulness, mostly exhibited in his surreptitious job hunting while being under contract, including when he jumped from the Falcons mid-season.

Okay, he’s a liar—but doesn’t his football record prove he’s great at his job? No…because he’s an educator; he coaches students, young men, in whom he’s supposed to imbue the principles of good character. Petrino can’t do that, because his own character is swill. Having someone with Petrino’s propensity to lie and break laws, rules, and commitments when it suits his needs to do so can only warp young minds, and a coach that wins games at the price of nurturing liars and cheats doesn’t belong on any college campus. He’s not a “great coach,” but an ethics corrupter.

But he’d be a better mother than Jessica Vega, I think. What kind of monster tells everyone including her husband-to-be that she has terminal cancer so she can have a glamorous wedding? A very, very sick one, I assume. Someone whose values are rotted through, and for whom the depths of her perversity and heartlessness are incalculable. She not only shouldn’t be raising children; she shouldn’t be permitted in the same room with them, lest her vile, sociopathic sensibilities and utter contempt for others seeps into their young souls like industrial pollutants contaminating ground water.

Sure, she’s a good mother… if the objective is to raise Lucretia Borgia, Joseph Mengele, Pol Pot and Voldemort.