During Bobby Petrino's many flirtations with other jobs while he was the head coach at Louisville, athletic director Tom Jurich always had the next guy in mind. When he finally hired Steve Kragthorpe in January 2007, he joked that Kragthorpe had almost been the Cardinals coach about four times in the previous four years.

Jurich never had any doubt that Kragthorpe was the right guy for Louisville. And even on Saturday, when announcing he had fired the coach after three uninspiring seasons, Jurich admitted that he would do the same thing over again if he could go back in time.

"I thought it was a great hire," Jurich said. "I thought he would really, really work out well here."

Kragthorpe had the pedigree as the son of a successful coach, and he boasted an impressive résumé of his own. He had engineered one of the great turnarounds in college football history by building Tulsa into a winner, and unlike Petrino, he wanted to put down roots and stay in Louisville for the long haul.

Instead, he inherited one of the Big East's most successful programs and led it to the league basement, failing to make a bowl game in each of his three seasons and watching his win total decrease every year, from six to five to this year's 4-8 record.

So what went wrong?

In some ways, Kragthorpe never recovered from his first season. With 18 returning starters from an Orange Bowl championship team, players openly talked about competing for the national title before the 2007 season. Instead, their defense got exposed early on, and back-to-back losses to Kentucky and Syracuse put Kragthorpe in prove-it mode with a disgruntled fan base. Had Kragthorpe gotten to a bowl game with all the talent he had on hand, perhaps fans would have been more understanding of the rebuilding mode the past two seasons.

Then again, fans never understood why such a successful program had to rebuild in the first place, and Kragthorpe never did a good job communicating what was going on behind the scenes. While he was far more accessible and personable than the often-irascible Petrino, he mostly spoke in vague generalities that offered very little insight.

Kragthorpe's personality also didn't seem to mesh with players who had been groomed under Petrino, a fierce taskmaster who kept people in line through intimidation. More than 20 players left the program in Kragthorpe's first year for a variety of reasons, which isn't that unusual during a coaching transition. But because of the Cardinals' recruiting misses under Petrino, that left major holes in the roster that Kragthorpe tried to fill with junior college players. And though several of those players did contribute, it continued a rebuilding spiral.

Even more so than that, Kragthorpe never fully utilized the talent on his team. For example, in 2007, instead of using 6-foot-6 receiver Mario Urrutia as a vertical threat as Petrino had, Kragthorpe's offense often called plays for Urrutia to go over the middle or catch screen passes. An unhappy Urrutia wound up leaving after the season as a junior.

Kragthorpe had three different offensive coordinators and four different defensive playcallers during his tenure. His teams often looked disjointed on the field, repeatedly burning timeouts in confusion early in games or lining up in the wrong formations. Kragthorpe's calls on third and fourth downs prompted a lot of head-scratching.

Perhaps the most damning evidence against Kragthorpe is this: He took over offensive coordinator duties this year, and the team averaged 18.5 points per game, worst in the Big East and the fewest by a Louisville team since 2006. Though he came to town with the reputation as a bright offensive mind, his offenses lacked imagination and paled in comparison to his predecessor.

While Kragthorpe tried to argue this week that the program was heading in the right direction, he had no real proof to back that up. The oddest thing is that, unlike Syracuse's bumbled hiring of Greg Robinson, everybody thought Kragthorpe would work out at Louisville.

It just never did.

"I thought he would be a great fit," Jurich said. "[But] certainly, he never really was a good fit from day one. That's something I've got to question myself on."