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Sullivan | Clemson got peek at Petrino's cards

Bobby Petrino needs to do a better job of scouting Bobby Petrino. He needs to track his own tendencies so as to leave no footprints worth following. The University of Louisville's head football coach should tread the road not taken, zig where he has previously zagged, and scrupulously avoid repeating himself or risk losing the element of surprise.

UofL's Bobby Petrino answers questions during a press conference on Monday.
October 13, 2014

For all of the consternation and criticism provoked by Petrino's puzzling decision to waste third down with a deliberate spike with 27 seconds left in Saturday's loss at Clemson – and deservedly so — the more galling development may have been that the Tigers claim to have known what was coming on fourth down.

Of the hundreds of adjectives that have been applied to Bobby Petrino – not all of them charitable – you could probably count the number of times his play-calling has been described as "predictable" on your thumbs. More often, Petrino's game-planning is three steps and 30 points ahead. Like most coaches, he also studies his own tendencies to ensure that he's not falling into a pattern.

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Yet amid the mind-numbing tedium of mid-week film study, Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables was convinced he found a clue as to what Petrino would call in a goal-line crunch. He saw the rollout pass play Petrino had used last year at Western Kentucky to beat Arkansas State, and he promptly added its defensive antidote to his pre-game preparations.

"It's so crazy, because we ran that play Thursday," Clemson safety Jayron Kearse told reporters Saturday night. "Coach V said, 'This is a play they will go to in crunch time.'. . .And when they lined up in that formation today, I knew what was coming. He put us in our best call – Red 2 – and that helped us out a lot. It was like deja-vu because I felt like I had already seen that play before."

Like military cryptographers, football coaches are generally slow to confirm that they've cracked a code. It's not only gauche to boast about outsmarting an opponent, it's potentially counterproductive. Why alert the other side to a weakness that might be worth exploiting in future encounters? Since Clemson and Louisville are now both members of the Atlantic Coast Conference's Atlantic Division, their future encounters will be annual.

Yet Brent Venables made no efforts at misdirection after Kearse crowed about the fourth-down call Saturday night. Rather, he reveled in it.

"We actually watched that exact play from a year ago when Petrino was at Western Kentucky," Venables volunteered. "We watched it at Thursday's meeting. . .because they ran it on the last play of his last game at Western Kentucky against Arkansas State with about eight or 10 seconds left on the clock — sprinted into the boundary and ran the little slant return."

Clemson practiced defending the play during Thursday afternoon's practice, but not to Venables' satisfaction. Later that night, the coach revisited the video and told his players, "Put that in your mind. That play is going to show up in a tight game."

It's not often that the planets align so precisely that a coach gets the opportunity to try the same play at the two-yard line with a game in the balance and less than 30 seconds left on the clock. Yet when an offense moves that close to the goal line – and particularly in the final minute of play – its play-calling options inevitably narrow. There's less room to work with, after all, and more defenders deployed in a smaller amount of space.

As the playing field contracts and becomes more densely populated, it becomes impossible to throw deep and harder to run wide. In fairness to Petrino, even the most creative coaches must choose from a condensed playbook in that spot.

"We had two plays that we could've called down there and I wish I would've called the other one," Petrino said. "That would've been a bunch play in the bunch formation and I wish I would've called the other one. You look back on it. You stay awake all night thinking, 'You dummy, why didn't you call the other one?' "

For all of his agonizing, Bobby Petrino can't know whether the other play would have worked. He should know, however, when it's time to try something new.

Tim Sullivan can be reached at (502) 582-4650, by email at tsullivan@courier-journal.com, and on Twitter @TimSullivan714