The next head football coach at Louisville will be Jeff Brohm.
It’s finally happening.
Jeff Brohm will return to Louisville and become the 23rd different head coach in the history of the Cardinal football program.
A source tells Card Chronicle that Brohm’s agent and Louisville athletic director Josh Heird agreed in principle to terms late Tuesday night. Now, all that remains is for Brohm’s contract to be approved by the U of L board and by new president Kim Schatzel.
According to ESPN’s Chris Low, that deal is set to be for six years and in the range of $35 million.
An official announcement was expected to come on Friday, but that could happen as early as Thursday now that the cat is out of the bag.
Born and raised in Louisville, Brohm starred at Trinity High School and became one of the most coveted high school quarterback recruits in the country. He spurned virtually every power program in America to stay home and suit up for the same U of L program that his father, Oscar, had years before.
Brohm was a Cardinal from 1989-1993, helping Howard Schnellenberger take the program to heights that were previously unfathomable. As a senior, he led Louisville to a 9-3 season and a win over Michigan State in the Liberty Bowl, a game where he earned MVP honors despite playing with a broken index finger.
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After a seven-season stint in the NFL, Brohm embarked on a coaching career that began in Louisville, where he served as the head coach of the Louisville Fire for one season before serving on the U of L staff from 2003-08. During that period of time, he twice turned down offers to be Nick Saban’s offensive coordinator at Alabama.
After assistant stints at Florida Atlantic, Illinois and UAB, Brohm was named the head coach at Western Kentucky in 2013. He went 30-10 with the Hilltoppers, winning 12 games and a conference championship in his second season, and 10 games and another league title in his final year in Bowling Green.
Brohm has spent the last six seasons at Purdue, a program which had lost 30 of its last 33 Big Ten games prior to his arrival. In West Lafayette, Brohm has gone to four bowl games in six years, knocked off three top 3 teams, and become the first head coach since Joe Tiller in 1996-97 to lead the Boilermakers to back-to-back 8-win seasons.
We’ve been saying for what feels like years that this fan base has needed a jolt in the arm. Here it is.
Let’s play football.
