Bobby Petrino has some serious owies

So ... the Bobby Petrino thing. It doesn't sound so good; I'm actually surprised this isn't a bigger story considering that one of the better coaches in the country is hospitalized with major injuries after inadvertently taking his Harley (!?!) off-roading.

The damage:

A source close to Petrino told Joe Schad the coach has broken ribs, among other injuries, and is "pretty banged up." The 51-year-old is focused and determined to return to practice as quickly as possible, but it could take some time for him to recover, the source said.

In a statement issued through the university, Petrino's family said the coach "is in stable condition and is expected to make a full recovery. Our family appreciates respect for our privacy during the recovery and we are grateful for the thoughts of Razorback fans at this time."

The lack of details other than vague descriptions like "banged up" and "stable condition" lead me to believe he's somewhere just short of an 11 on this more-accurate-than-the-real-one pain chart:

Good work, Hyperbole and a Half.

I don't have a lot to add here given the minimal information available, but there are a couple things worth mentioning/speculating. The first is that Petrino does not have to play with broken ribs and/or a punctured lung and/or whatever else he's got goin' on; he could presumably sit in a wheelchair and coach the game from the press box if needed, and that might not even be needed considering that he's got almost five months to recover from what allegedly aren't life-threatening injuries. The second is that if he's really in crappy shape and isn't physically capable of being in attendance, Arkansas might have some issues on offense. Petrino has called his own plays for as long as I've been paying attention to stuff like that and doesn't even have the option of continuity since O-coordinator Garrick McGee left to take the head coaching job at UAB about five months ago.

The guy who took McGee's spot: Paul Petrino. Whether that's a good thing or not is pretty tough to say given that the large majority of his career had been spent working right under Bobby until he went to Illinois and had one pretty good year in 2010 (45th in yardage) and one pretty crappy one in 2011 (85th in yardage). Those data points are (a) wildly variant and (b) have to be filtered through the stink of Ron Zook strategory, which means you should probably pay them even less attention than you would normally pay a tiny sample of unrelated numbers. Woo.

Fortunately for Arkansas, this probably won't be relevant at all; I type just to hear the soothing sound of my fingers punching keys. The most likely scenario (IMO) involves Bobby Petrino healing/recovering sufficiently to be back to his relative norm by July for fall camp, which yay happy times. The alternative scenario involves the healing/recovering thing not going so well and Arkansas getting stuck with some undesirable decisions about its 2012 coaching staff, specifically who's gonna be in charge of it. I'm hoping for the former.