On the day three years ago Jeff Brohm was introduced – no, presented would be a better word, because he needed no introduction – as the new head football coach of the Louisville Cardinals, he did not take long to acknowledge the obvious.
“This is home to me,” he said.
The Brohms can be considered the first family of Louisville football, with Jeff starring at quarterback for the 1993 Liberty Bowl champions, Greg playing four years at wide receiver and younger brother Brian excelling as a three-year starter for the Cardinals, including with the 12-1 team in 2006. Their father, Oscar, played QB for the Cards, as well.
Like so many forced by their careers to journey elsewhere, Jeff Brohm pursued advancement in such disparate venues as the coast of Florida and the plains of Illinois. He rose from quarterbacks coach to passing game coordinator to offensive coordinator at various programs to become head coach at Western Kentucky and then Purdue. There were two opportunities to leave the Boilermakers and return to Louisville, the first after he’d been with the Boilermakers just a couple years, and the second arriving four years later and ultimately impossible to resist.
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Brohm has been Cardinals head coach since 2023, and they’re working on their third consecutive winning season. Could he leave now? Could he really look at the long journey necessary to arrive in the dream job of head coach at his alma mater and say, in a sense: “I love it here, but it’s time for a new challenge?”
Because a successful pursuit of Brohm is the one realistic path Penn State could follow to elevating its program from the James Franklin years toward an even brighter future.
It always was obvious the Nittany Lions wouldn’t convince Curt Cignetti to leave Indiana, though possibly not to them, when they fired Franklin after six games. Most of the others mentioned as potential candidates have had plenty of time to show they are on Franklin’s level, and have not, or are rising prospects with promising resumes who could turn out to be Billy Napier (fired), Kirby Smart (revered) or Mike Norvell (once revered, now …)
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Brohm is not a sure thing, primarily because it’s not a certainty he would accept the position. It is becoming difficult to imagine, though, he would not turn a program as prominent and capitalized as Penn State into the perennial championship contender its administration demands.
Those who are invested in the Nittany Lions allowed their program to be defined by what it was not accomplishing (4-21 against top-10 opponents) rather than what it had achieved under Franklin (a Big Ten title, two Big Ten Championship game appearances, a College Football Playoff final four and an average of 11 wins over the past three seasons.)
None of the programs Brohm has coached carried the heft of Penn State, which owns two national championships, more bowl wins than all but four programs and the second-largest stadium in college football. And yet he owns an 89-53 record, 5-2 in bowl games. More to the point, his performance against esteemed opponents has been phenomenal. While coaching Purdue, he defeated three teams ranked at the time in the top 5. At Louisville, his Cardinals defeated No. 10 Notre Dame in 2023 and, this past weekend, No. 2 Miami on the road.
| School | Record |
| Western Kentucky | 30-10 |
| Purdue | 36-34 |
| Louisville | 24-9 |
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Why Brohm might consider leaving Louisville was contained right there in that paragraph. He will have the luxury of coaching the Cardinals pretty much as long as he wishes, and he earns an extremely comfortable living at $6 million a year. He can contend for ACC titles and College Football Playoff berths. The road to the CFP title, though, does not travel through the modern ACC. It is not impossible to win it from there, but it’s far less likely than for those coaching in the SEC and Big Ten.
Their members have won 85 percent of the CFP trophies since the event was introduced in 2014, and they consumed 73 percent of the championship game slots. Those numbers only figure to increase as their revenue advantages persist.
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Penn State is an established member of this upper crust, with enough money to blow on a defensive coordinator whose unit is allowing an average of 30 points to Big Ten opponents. Brohm would receive all the resources necessary to make his team regularly competitive with the elite. Far more than anyone else, he looks like the one who could turn “regularly competitive” into “frequently superior”.
As one who recently returned home after three decades working in other locations, I would understand as well as anyone why Brohm would be disinterested in another move. If this opportunity were presented to him and he declined, he almost certainly would remain Louisville for life.