Coaches are people, and some people are corrupt or foolish

Arkansas fired Bobby Petrino as its football coach because of his "personal and professional relationship" with a female employee who was riding with him on a motorcycle that crashed earlier this month. Petrino "knowingly misled the athletics department and the university about the circumstances related to his accident," Arkansas Athletic Director Jeff Long said Tuesday.

Petrino had not disclosed that Jessica Dorrell, a 25-year-old female member of his staff, was on his motorcycle with him when it crashed on April 1 and that he had given her unfairly favorable treatment in hiring her on his staff.

"Coach Petrino knowingly misled the athletics department and the university about the circumstances related to his accident," Arkansas Athletics Director Jeff Long said Tuesday.

Petrino took the Arkansas job with three games left in the 2007 NFL season even though he was coaching the Atlanta Falcons at the time.

Jim Tressel resigned last May as Ohio State's football coach amid NCAA violations from a tattoo-parlor scandal.

Tressel said he didn't tell anyone at Ohio State about what he had learned about things quarterback Terrelle Pryor and other Buckeye players chose not to tell anyone because he was bound by confidentiality to not expose the federal drug trafficking investigation. Yet he had forwarded the very first email he received from Cicero to a so-called mentor of Pryor, a businessman named Ted Sarniak.

A 10-day investigation by Ohio State resulted in the school imposing five-game suspensions on five players. However, those penalties were not to start until the beginning of the 2011 season. The players were allowed to participate in that season's Sugar Bowl, though. The Buckeyes' opponent was ... Arkansas.

Miami Marlins Manager Ozzie Guillen got a 5-game suspension from his team for saying "I love Fidel Castro. I respect Fidel Castro, you know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that motherf****r is still here."

Naturally, that upset much of a Cuban-American population in Miami.

Guillen apologized Tuesday, saying saying he was misquoted. "What I meant in Spanish, I was talking in Spanish, was that I cannot believe somebody who hurt so many people over the years is still alive."

In 2006, then-Chicago White Sox manager Guillen called then-Chicago Sun Times writer Jay Mariotti a "fag" because Guillen was angry with a column Mariotti wrote about him. Guillen apologized for using the homophobic slur, but didn't apologize to Mariotti.

New Orleans Saints Coach Sean Payton was suspended by the NFL for a year because of a bounty system that went on for three years on his team, with defensive coordinator Gregg Williams offering cash incentives for defensive players to injure opposing players.

"When this first was raised over two years ago, there were denials," league commissioner Roger Goodell said. "They frankly were not forthright with what was happening. And that continued, and it continued even through our investigation into the past several weeks."

Cover-ups and lies. People think coaches and managers of the elite teams in American professional and college sports must be pretty bright people. Many are, of course. Many are extremely intelligent and have moral compasses that would serve as good examples to us.

Others, though, aren't overly smart in areas other than coaching. Some, like any cross-section of society, are just plain corrupt. Power, it has been said, does corrupt.

Someone will hire Petrino within a year because he's a very good coach. Some day again, Guillen will say something that is both offensive and idiotic.

And sometime down the line, there probably will again be a major bowl game pitting two coaches who will be fired for poor judgment within the following two years.