Louisville enters Kragthorpe era with title aspirations

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NEWPORT, R.I. -- Brian Brohm was in the midst of a Google search when he received his first call from new Louisville coach Steve Kragthorpe.

He was looking up Kragthorpe's name.

"I was not real familiar with Tulsa," said the Cardinals' star quarterback.

Just days earlier, Brohm had been basking in the aftermath of an Orange Bowl victory over Wake Forest that capped the most successful season in Louisville history. Though the NFL was calling his name, Brohm had just about made up his mind to return for his senior season and the chance to lead the team he rooted for as a child to its first-ever national championship.

And then, suddenly, his and his teammates' world was turned upside down by coach Bobby Petrino's departure for the Atlanta Falcons.

Rare is the occasion when the coach of a ready-made national title contender abruptly jumps ship. It's even more rare that a program replace that person with the coach from Tulsa.

But Louisville is hardly your ordinary national power, and, as Brohm and the rest of the Cardinals community have since learned, Kragthorpe is not your ordinary mid-major coach.

Louisville's meteoric rise to national prominence over the past decade has been well-documented. The constant throughout has been athletic director Tom Jurich, who hired both John L. Smith (1998-2002), the man who rescued the Cardinals' program from the ashes, and Petrino (2003-06), who turned them into a top-10 team.

When Petrino -- who had flirted with leaving Louisville every year since his arrival -- finally pulled the trigger, Jurich already knew who he was going to call: A man he'd first worked with as the athletic director at Northern Arizona nearly 15 years earlier.

Since that stint as the Lumberjacks' offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach (1990-93), the 42-year-old Steve Kragthorpe has won a Big 12 championship (as Texas A&M's offensive coordinator in '98), coached in the NFL (as the Buffalo Bills' quarterbacks coach in 2001-02) and orchestrated one of the most impressive turnarounds in recent memory. Tulsa, 2-21 in the two seasons before his arrival, played in three bowl games during four years under Kragthorpe.

"I was blown away by what Steve did at Tulsa," said South Florida coach Jim Leavitt. "If Louisville could even be stronger, with him they are."

At Tulsa, Kragthorpe earned notoriety for running much the same type of creative, wide-open offense for which Louisville has become synonymous. Kragthorpe's Tulsa offense was similar enough to Petrino's that he and the Cardinals' returning assistants (including offensive coordinator Jeff Brohm, Brian's brother) were able to merge the two fairly smoothly and simply change some terminology.

"It's interesting," Kragthorpe noted this week at Big East Media Days. "I worked for Kevin Gilbride in 2002 [with the Bills]. He had worked for Tom Coughlin in Jacksonville. Bobby [Petrino] subsequently came to Jacksonville and picked up a lot of the same things I brought from Buffalo to Tulsa."