Scott Satterfield has “no intention” of leaving despite coaching rumors

Louisville football’s head coach is under some heat after rumors surfaced of a possible job interview.

It is Louisville football‘s bye week but it has been everything but that for Scott Satterfield and the program.

Rumors of a mutual interest between the University of South Carolina and Satterfield pertaining to the vacant head coaching position at the SEC institution started to pop up just before Thanksgiving. To this, Satterfield dismissed any claims that he was pursuing any other job opportunity in a tweet.

Just as Louisville football fans were beginning to feel hopeful and optimistic after the dismissal of the rumors by Satterfield, more damning ones popped up early Saturday morning just a week before the Cardinals’ last game next Saturday against Wake Forest.

The report claims that South Carolina athletic director Ray Tanner conducted the interview with Satterfield on Friday.

It’s that time of the year again in college football. Some of the biggest programs in the country have coaching vacancies and are looking for the next man to lead their team to victory and good fortune.

Scott Satterfield is just one name in this selective pool of coaches that will earn interviews with power five schools looking to have their program elevated.

Many fans and players across social media, namely Twitter, voiced their displeasure with the rumors re-circulating after Satterfield claimed his focus was with the program.

https://twitter.com/greatyaya4/status/1335263296644116483?s=20

This kind of rhetoric is all too familiar for Louisville fans who had to deal with Bobby Petrino darting for the Atlanta Falcons in the NFL and Charlie Strong to the University of Texas in the recent past. Both new ventures failed for these coaches.

After the long day of speculation on Saturday, Scott Satterfield confirmed with the Courier Journal that he would be staying with Louisville and had “no intention” of leaving.

Satterfield’s comment regarding “no intention” is fascinating if he did in fact interview for the job. He very well may have had intentions of leaving had he been offered the job or he may not have. There is no real way of knowing for sure.

Regardless, fans should come around to expecting Satterfield to stick with the Cardinals at least through 2021. This is good news for the 2021 recruiting class that boasts a good amount of talent that will be injected into the program as early as Dec. 16.

A coaching turnaround could have been detrimental to a recruiting class that is coming in without many recruits even getting the opportunity to see the University of Louisville campus in person due to Covid reasons that have caused the college football “dead period” to be extended into Spring 2021.

Now, though relationships may be damaged, Satterfield will give himself the opportunity to save the class and keep it together despite the amount of swirling rumors around him.

Fans, players, and (likely) recruits ares upset with the developments over the past 10 days. They want a coach that wants to stay in Louisville and build the program to national relevance once again.

Many considered South Carolina to be a lateral move for Satterfield. However, the Gamecocks are an SEC program that is closer to his roots and in the heart of a hot bed of talent that lies within the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Regardless of record at SC, that is still something that Satterfield had to have been thinking about.

Satterfield has work to do to make amends for everything that has happened from his dismissive comments about any job opportunity to his “conversation” with South Carolina. Satterfield was a huge piece of resuscitating the program in 2019 after rock bottom was tested in 2018 under former coach Bobby Petrino. Now he has another test.

The issue many onlookers seem to be fighting with is if his dismissive comments were a form of lying from the second year head coach. Many fans seem to think so.

In the world that is college coaching, there are tons of moving parts that many outside of the room likely will never hear about. Satterfield will come back in 2021 with a lot of talented players returning and joining the program. The job he does of getting the players and fans to buy back in to what he is preaching will be a massive storyline to follow throughout the entirety of next season.

It was interesting enough that South Carolina had so much interest in Scott Satterfield. Despite his amazing 2019 season, the 2020 season has been a massive disappointment all featured by a 3-7 football team.

Overall, I am not mad at Satterfield listening to other schools. That is well within his rights to listen to what programs have to offer. However, Satterfield’s comments made last week seemed to suggest that he would at least wait until the season’s end before he started listening to any other sort of offer. That has clearly rubbed some (including players in the program) the wrong way.

Thus, he has created a lot of make-up work for himself of gaining trust to the fanbase, players, staff, and perhaps administration. I do not doubt that Satterfield can come back and be successful with this group in 2021.

Much of how successful he could be will rely on how he re-forms his bond with the players and fans to take some of the heat off of himself. With Louisville only having one game remaining in the season,

2021 could now suddenly become a make-or-break year for Satterfield as the head coach at the University of Louisville.