‘This Is Home’: Jeff Brohm’s Return to Louisville Is a Lifetime in the Making

Now that his honeymoon period is over, the former Cardinals quarterback says it’s ‘time to back it up’ and take the program to new heights.

Jeff Faughender/Courier Journal/USA TODAY Network

Intrigue was in the air on the night of Dec. 6, 2022, at the Hilton Garden Inn near the Indianapolis airport. Clandestine operations were ongoing both inside and outside the mundane hotel on the city’s west side.

In a guest room, Louisville athletic director Josh Heird and Purdue football coach Jeff Brohm met secretly over a sack of Culver’s hamburgers. This was their initial discussion about bringing Brohm home to The ‘Ville, a mutual dream that previously had been delayed and nearly derailed by bad timing. Meanwhile, in the parking lot, spies lurked.

Brohm’s irrepressible son, Brady, was so excited by the possibility of Louisville hiring his dad that he refused to watch this play out from afar in West Lafayette. This was the day after Brady’s 18th birthday; for a kid born into the first family of Louisville football, the present of a lifetime was within reach. So Brady implored his uncle, Greg—Jeff’s right-hand man on the Purdue football staff—to drive him to the site of the meeting, some 75 miles away. The two Brohms rolled into the hotel lot, cased the joint, realized that nothing was going to happen that they could snoop on, went to Buffalo Wild Wings and then waited for the meeting to end.

Brady Brohm wasn’t the only potential security breach threatening this hush-hush mission. After the meeting was hurriedly arranged, Heird drove north on Interstate 65 from Louisville to Indy wearing Cardinals gear; on the way he decided he needed something more incognito in the Boilermakers’ backyard. Heird stopped at an outlet mall in Edinburgh, Ind., to buy a generic Adidas pullover—but upon pulling out his University of Louisville athletic department credit card to pay for it, the store clerk said, “Do you work there? I’m from Louisville.”

Heird was sure his cover would be blown, but the meeting stayed quiet for as long as it needed to—which, as it turned out, wasn’t very long. This was a coaching search that never went past its first choice, inevitably ending where it inevitably began.

On the night of Dec. 4, embattled coach Scott Satterfield informed Heird that he was talking to Cincinnati about its job opening. Heird assumed that meant Satterfield was leaving, so he stayed up until 3 a.m. making plans for that event. At 6:45 a.m. on Dec. 5, Heird texted Brohm’s agent, Shawn Freibert, to establish contact in case he had an opening to fill. Thirty minutes later, Satterfield called Heird to say he was leaving—a gift for a program that suddenly was freed from paying a buyout for a coach who had lost much of the fan base.

Heird and Brohm held their hamburger summit at the Garden Inn about 36 hours after Satterfield took the Cincinnati job (the pace was slowed just a bit by a commitment Freibert had in California). Less than 48 hours after that meeting, Brohm was introduced to a raucous standing ovation as the new head coach at the school he rooted for as a kid, played at as a collegian and worked at as an assistant.

Purdue athletic director Mike Bobinski did what he could to keep the guy who had just taken the Boilermakers to their first Big Ten championship game. According to Oscar Brohm, Jeff’s dad, Bobinski offered to let Jeff name his contract terms: pick the salary, pick the length, we’ll make it work. But Louisville was selling something Purdue could never match.

“This is home for me,” Brohm said at his introduction, and the proof of that was everywhere. The Angel’s Envy club lounge at L&N Federal Credit Union Stadium was packed with generations of Louisvillians who laid claim to knowing and/or cheering for Jeff at the NFL, college, high school and even elementary-school level.

Jeff’s dad, Oscar, a star quarterback at now closed Flaget High School who was billed as “the next Unitas” when he signed and played for the Cardinals, was present with his wife, Donna. Older brother Greg, who played receiver for the Cardinals with Jeff, was in attendance. Younger sister Kim, a three-sport athlete at Spalding University in Louisville, was there. Younger brother Brian Brohm, who also played QB for the Cards, was still back at Purdue but joined the Louisville staff soon enough.

And right there among the masses was Hilton Garden Inn stalker Brady Brohm with his mom, Jennifer, and younger sister, Brooke, who had her own role in this family drama. All of them were beaming as a familial dream came true in real time.

Nine months later, Jeff Brohm is sitting in a meeting room with his right foot propped up on a table. This is Monday, and his first Louisville team plays Georgia Tech on Friday. The coach looks relaxed, but there is a hint at the opening-week nerves percolating within.

In his left hand, the 52-year-old Brohm is reflexively clicking one of those old-school, four-color pens that were all the rage when he was a kid. He’s got a bucket of them in his office that he uses, switching colors to help organize the notes he diligently jots down from film and practices. “Kind of grade-schoolish,” he says. “But it works for me.”

Red, click. Black, click. Blue, click. Green, click. Brohm is talking and clicking at the same time. You get the feeling his mind is elsewhere, likely deep in the call sheet for Georgia Tech. He very much wants to get this opener right.

“It’s not just a job,” Oscar Brohm says. “It’s personal.”

Jeff Brohm’s personal journey from a hero’s welcome in December to kickoff in September was a blur, with several key milestones along the way. Sports Illustrated checked in with Brohm regularly throughout the breakneck process of putting his first Louisville team together.

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Dec. 21, 2022: Early signing day and life in transition

A giant stack of cardboard boxes marked “Purdue” sits on the L&N Stadium concourse directly outside Jeff Brohm’s office. It’s his 13th day on the job, and the boxes arrived about a week ago. There hasn’t been much time for unpacking.

“I take a couple boxes a day and unpack them,” Brohm says. “I’ve thrown more stuff away. I hoarded way too much.”

Adding players has taken precedence over discarding clutter. After Brohm’s introductory press conference, he met with the team—with the transfer portal open, retention was priority No. 1—and several players individually. Then he took off the next day for a California recruiting trip, looking to solidify previous verbal commitments from five high school players from that state. Four of those are four-star prospects according to Rivals.com, with quarterback Pierce Clarkson a recruiting ringleader in that area for the Cardinals.

After returning to Louisville at 5:30 a.m. on Monday, Brohm watched parts of a couple of the Cardinals’ practices in advance of their Dec. 17 Fenway Bowl game against Cincinnati (Satterfield’s new school) while planning out a Southern strategy for the next recruiting trip—Mississippi, then Atlanta, then South Florida. When in Miami, one must visit Joe’s Stone Crab—and one must visit it with rapper and well-connected South Florida high school football aficionado Luther Campbell. Louisville had commitments from several Miami players Brohm wanted to solidify.

Brohm & Co. landed back in Louisville at 2 a.m. that Friday, Dec. 16, switching quickly from traveling recruiter to recruiting host. The Cardinals welcomed 26 visitors to campus that weekend, a mix of high school prospects and college transfers. Everything was in transition: The ’22 Louisville team and its skeleton coaching staff were in Boston for the bowl, while grad assistants and quality-control personnel were helping Brohm and his half-hired new staff put on the recruiting weekend.

While entertaining recruits, Brohm and his staffers tried to steal glances at the TV to see Louisville’s 24–7 win over the Bearcats. But mostly the focus was on building the roster for the future—and, when time permitted, hiring a full staff. A lot of prospective assistant hires were tied up through bowl games, so Brohm made calls while driving to and from the office to see who could be available and when.

College football’s nonsensical December calendar, which collides early signing day with transfer portal movement, coaching changes and bowl games, is overbooked enough for an established head coach. When you’re new on the job, it’s much worse.

“I always thought college football coaching used to be way more busy than NFL coaching jobs—now you can times that by ten,” Brohm says. "If you think about it too much, you’re wasting time. I stopped a few times and thought, ‘My God, I’m never going to get all this done.’ So you just have to keep going on it. You put the big topics up on the board and just hit it.”

Indeed, the whiteboard in the staff room highlights those big topics and where Louisville stands in addressing them. Greg Brohm has been driving the organizational bus on that front, especially when Jeff has been out of town. “We think alike,” Greg says. “A lot of times I’ll know what he wants or what he’s thinking before he even has to tell me.”

At the signing day press conference, Brohm talks with guarded optimism about the 18-man class. The quick recruiting trips paid off: Five of Louisville’s signees are from California, three from Miami and one from Atlanta. “I wanted to keep things intact as much as I can,” he says. “I needed to meet these young men and their families. Without question, the California connection was important.”

Amid this whirlwind, Brohm’s kids are adjusting to their new/old home. Daughter Brooke lands a spot on a local club volleyball team and makes the basketball team at her school—Jeff carved out time to catch 45 minutes of volleyball practice one night. The day after signing day, he and Jennifer are due at Trinity to get Brady enrolled at Jeff’s alma mater.

As for Christmas, which is coming in four days? Jeff told Jennifer, “Look for what you want, it’s on me. Plan a trip. Take my credit card.” He laughs. “I’ve never been great at Christmas shopping before, but this year especially.”

The one thing that makes this transition far easier than most new coaches’ experience: The Brohms never sold the house they bought in Louisville when Jeff was an assistant coach at the school from 2003 to ’08. It’s a nice house with a basketball hoop and a golf cart in the driveway, located in a subdivision near Fern Creek, the area where the Brohms grew up. But it’s far removed from the tony East End neighborhoods where most of the wealthiest Louisvillians congregate.

That’s in keeping with who Jeff Brohm is and has always been. He famously drove a 2004 Honda Accord to work at Purdue because he’s allergic to ostentation. He might have a six-year, $36 million contract at Louisville, but you can’t take the Fern Creek out of him.

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Late January 2023: Winter conditioning meets early enrollees

The smell of fresh paint suffuses the offices at the Howard Schnellenberger Football Complex. The staff just finished hosting a class of 2024 weekend built around the Cardinals’ home men’s basketball game against North Carolina (the dismal state of the hoops program isn’t helping show recruits the customary campus buzz during basketball season). With that over, most of the full-time assistants hit the road recruiting, providing an opportune time for the athletic department to update its workspace.

Downstairs, the strength and conditioning staff is getting busy molding the 2023 Cardinals with workouts on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Iron clatters in the weight room; whistles screech during sprints on the indoor field. Suffering is in the air as the hard work begins.

Several freshman signees have enrolled early for the spring semester, but, more important, so has a cadre of transfers who are more likely to make an immediate impact. Louisville had a recruiting weekend Jan. 6–8 that culminated with some transfers committing on the spot and starting classes on the 9th. Among the January arrivals expected to be an early contributor: Stanford transfer Stephen Herron, a local product who came home and is transitioning from Cardinal to Cardinals after recording 10 sacks in 30 games in Palo Alto.

“I told Brohm on Day 1, I’m going to bring a level of maturity to the team, a level of experience,” Herron says. “I think what Coach Brohm is trying to do is exactly not start at ground zero. He’s trying to elevate us as quickly as possible. We know this community is looking for us to win games, and win games quickly.”

Toward that end, Brohm mined the portal for another Bay Area transfer—a quarterback who has extensive knowledge of his playbook and preferences. That’s Jack Plummer from California, and before that Purdue. Plummer was a spot starter in three seasons for Brohm at Purdue but wasn’t going to start in 2022, so he moved to Berkeley and threw for 3,000 yards. With a season of eligibility remaining, Plummer is back with Brohm.

This is college football in 2023: The quarterback has wisps of gray in his hair, is on his third team and has endured the football version of a midlife crisis.

“I got invited to a couple of senior all-star games and I was contemplating testing my name in the NFL or playing another year at Cal,” Plummer says. “There was a lot going on. Then once I saw Coach got the job here, I thought I’d go in the portal and see if he wanted me or what other opportunities were out there. They knew me as a player, they knew what I was capable of.”

The roster will be a work in progress for months to come. But the quarterback position—the most important on any team, especially a Jeff Brohm–coached team—is in capable hands. While the staff spends weeks during the winter installing its offensive and defensive systems and updating their playbooks, Plummer has a head start on general concepts. When the team begins voluntary throwing sessions, he’s ready to take charge of the offense.

Spring practice will be a crash course for most of the team and an inflection point for the staff, as they try to figure out what position groups they still need to shore up in the portal. (Offensive line would be the area of acute need.) It will also be an exercise in community outreach, with open practices and a spring game that is billed as “an event.” Given the dilapidated state of the men’s basketball program, which not many years ago was filling the 22,000-seat KFC Yum Center, Louisville fans are hungry for something to cheer for.

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Brohm, who played quarterback for Louisville for five seasons, says he wants to do something special at his alma mater.  :: RVR Photos/USA TODAY Sports

April 19: Breaking bread with the people

The parking lot at Rooster’s on Bardstown Road is full except for one spot near the entrance. Brady Brohm is standing in it, holding the space for his mom, who arrives just before 7 p.m. Inside the Fern Creek restaurant, a crowd has gathered for the Jeff Brohm Radio Show in advance of the spring game two days later.

The show is boilerplate coach-speak, but the fan feedback is enthusiastic. Host Jody Demling puts Jeff through a series of questions about various positions and general expectations, and Jeff supplies routine answers. He then passes the headset to a pair of assistant coaches who fill the rest of the show, while Jeff greets some fans and poses for a few pictures before powering through a plate of chicken wings.

For once, he is not in a hurry to get somewhere else. He has friends and neighbors in attendance, not to mention his wife and kids, siblings, mom and dad. Jeff had to warn a lot of them that just because he’s moved back home doesn’t mean he’s routinely available, especially during the ramp-up to this first season, but this is easy family time—one of the benefits of returning to Louisville.

“I think everyone trusts that we’re going to do everything we can to do our part to win and do something special,” Brohm says. “If you can do it amongst your family and friends and hometown fans, then it can mean that much more. But we can’t do anything other than work our butt off.”

The connectivity to the Brohms goes back generations in a heavily Catholic city that loves its neighborhood football allegiances. Churches serve as the cultural community hubs: parish fish fries during Lent, picnics proliferating during the sticky summer months, then the athletic rites of autumn: football at the all-boys high schools and volleyball at the all-girls schools.

The Catholic football tradition runs deep, back to the days when Paul Hornung was a hot shot at Flaget High School in the early 1950s, on his way to becoming the Golden Boy who won the Heisman Trophy at Notre Dame and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Thousands of fans show up every year for the grade-school Toy Bowl championships, with parish pride on the line. The fervor cranks up several notches at the high-school level, with crowds of 30,000 to 40,000 the annual norm when powerhouse programs Saint Xavier and Trinity meet in Louisville’s stadium.

Those folks made up a large swath of the crowd last December when Brohm was introduced as the new coach of the Cardinals. There were familiar faces from parishes across the city: from Margaret Mary and Ascension and Holy Name; from Saint Raphael and Holy Spirit and Notre Dame. Many of them have never lived anywhere but Louisville. Most introductions in this milieu are quickly followed by the question, “Where did you go to school?” And they don’t mean college; they mean which high school or even grade school.

The Brohm kids attended Saint Bernard, where Jeff joked that they perfected “the bulletin trick”—showing up just long enough at Mass to grab a bulletin as proof of attendance to bring home, then leaving. They were all multisport heroes for the Bernard Wildcats—just as Mom and Dad, Oscar and Donna, were star grade-school jocks in the “Lively Shively” area of town, on their way to becoming high school sweethearts.

“He was Saint Denis, and I was Saint Helen,” Donna says. “He was Cane Run Road, and I was Dixie Highway. He was the big old senior at Flaget, and I was a junior playing every sport they had at Angela Merici.”

Both those high schools have long since shut down, and many neighborhood parishes have consolidated schools. But the big, single-sex ones remain: Saint X, Trinity and DeSales for boys; Sacred Heart, Assumption, Mercy and Presentation for girls. The pipeline that produced the Brohms and countless other standout athletes shows no sign of drying up.

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June 7: The Brohm symposium

The site is the Frazier History Museum downtown. The occasion is a roundtable discussion with Oscar, Donna, Jeff, Greg and Kim Brohm. The topic: the reunion of the clan in their hometown. About 100 guests who bought tickets for the event are present.

Servers are circulating with appetizers and the bar is stocked with the local liquor of choice: bourbon. One Louisville fan who has had more than one drink approaches athletic director Heird and asks, “Josh, you think we can get in the SEC?” Heird responds in a tone a parent might use when a 5-year-old asks for a pony for Christmas: “No.” End of topic.

The Brohms are regaling fans with tales from their time growing up in Fern Creek. The Thanksgiving backyard football games were epic and occasionally dangerous. Oscar would enlist his five brothers to play against a swarm of their kids while claiming the quarterback position for himself due to “seniority.” One year, he put on his old Louisville jersey for the game and Donna cracked, “I hope they hurt you.” She felt bad about that when he had to go to the hospital with a punctured lung.

With the entire family steeped in the sport, Jeff is the frequent target of coaching feedback. Uncles watching games on TV at home have been known to text Greg adjustments that need to be made at halftime. When Jeff was the coach at Western Kentucky, Jennifer talked him into putting a flea-flicker on the call sheet for one game. He called it on the first snap of the second quarter and the receiver was wide open.

“Do I really want this to be completed?” Jeff thought to himself when the ball was in the air, knowing he’d never hear the end of it. It was indeed completed for a big gain, and his wife did give Jeff a “told-you-so” greeting postgame.

But Brady is the one who has taken his involvement to another level.

He’s been hyperinvested on the coaching side of the sport, more than playing, since he was a child. Nine years ago when Jeff was in his first season as head coach at WKU, he ordered up a two-point conversion attempt in overtime against an undefeated Marshall team. The score was Marshall 66, Western 65, and Brohm wanted to win it right there. Of course, that almost meant the chance of losing it right there.

“What are we doing?” Brady wailed on the sideline to Greg Brohm, tears in his eyes, yanking at his uncle’s shirt. “We could lose!” Western’s two-point play worked, the Hilltoppers won and Brady led the charge onto the field to celebrate.

Brady now is a freshman at Louisville with no official role, but he’s everywhere at the football complex—to the point that Jeff has had to crack down on him about missing class to spend time with the team. He’s immersed in recruiting, tracking the comings and goings in the transfer portal with zeal, connecting with prospects and their coaches online.

“When I want to know what’s going on,” says Oscar, “I call Brady.”

This was Herron’s recollection of the official visit he took to Purdue during high school, before going to Stanford: “Brady was the first face I saw. Brady was the last face I saw.”

And Brady was the first to sound the Brohm family alarm when Scott Satterfield left for Cincinnati. Jeff had just dropped off Brady at school on the morning of Dec. 5 when he received a text from his son advising him of the news he’d just seen on Twitter (now called X). Then Brady called Oscar. The opportunity they thought had gotten away suddenly reappeared.

When Jeff turned down the Louisville job to stay at Purdue in November 2018, the family was heartbroken but understanding. He’d been in West Lafayette only two seasons, and despite taking the Boilermakers to their first back-to-back bowl games in more than a decade, he knew the program rebuild was not complete. Bobinski was paying him well and investing heavily in facility upgrades. Brohm has been assuring recruits that he was in it for the long haul. The timing was wrong.

By 2022, the dynamics had changed considerably. Purdue was in solid shape and Satterfield was treading water at Louisville. When the Cardinals started 2–3, there was speculation that Satterfield was one loss away from being fired.

Around that time, Brooke Brohm wrote a note to her parents saying what she wanted for her birthday Nov. 18: to move back to Louisville. Brooke and Jennifer had actually spent a semester of the previous school year in Louisville. Jennifer’s mom was facing a serious medical condition and Jennifer went to stay with her. Brooke followed, enrolled in school and loved the experience.

Against that backdrop, Satterfield promptly pulled his job out of the fire with an improbable four-game winning streak, three of them in ACC play. The Brohm family couldn’t bring themselves to root against the Cardinals, but the potential job opening they saw materializing for Jeff suddenly disappeared. Donna Brohm told Brady and Brooke that, once again, the timing wasn’t right for a return to Louisville.

Louisville finished the regular season with a 7–5 record, a sign of progress, but the year ended with another humbling loss to hated rival Kentucky. Fans were over Satterfield, and Heird was not going to upgrade the coach’s contract—but he and the school appeared stuck with each other for a fifth season.

Then Cincinnati called Satterfield. And Louisville called Brohm. And when Jeff called his parents to talk about it, Oscar offered his thoughts.

“You got offered the job once, and I think you showed a lot of character in not taking it for the reasons you did,” he told Jeff. “Now you’re getting it again, right after going to the Big Ten championship. I’m sorry, but this is God giving you a message. You’re getting this opportunity twice.”

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Aug. 28: It’s time to play

Some coaches are cocksure of victory heading into a game. Jeff Brohm is not that coach, at least internally.

“I’m always worried we’re going to get killed,” he says. “I wish I could sit here and lie and say I’m really confident going in—no, I’m not. I’m scared we’re going to get killed. I try to use that to help me, to watch a little more film and help us be better prepared.”

A final question, after nine months of them: Will there be a moment before kickoff in Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Friday night when Jeff Brohm allows himself to zoom out from game focus to let it soak in that he is the head coach at the school that shaped him and his family?

“Probably, yeah,” he says. “But really that has soaked in for the last six or seven months, all the people saying welcome back and wishing us well. The honeymoon period is over, and now it’s time to back it up. It’s time to play. Either ‘blank’ or get off the pot.”