Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

Paul Petrino went to his office at the Broyles Athletic Center on Monday and gathered up a few items that he figured would be essential to planning the week’s football practices. He then made his way to Physician’s Specialty Hospital in Fayetteville where his brother, Arkansas head coach Bobby Petrino, was being treated for an assortment of injuries following a motorcycle accident.

Their planning session, Paul said, was treated just like they were in a meeting room at the office.

Sure, Bobby Petrino was hospitalized Sunday evening after a 6:45 p.m. motorcycle accident left him with broken ribs, a chipped vertebrae and a serious case of road rash on his face. Yet here he was focused on football, refusing to let his condition keep him from work.

Petrino told family members, friends, recruits and employees he’d be back at practice on Tuesday. That was before doctors gave him their blessing.

None of this, of course, surprised Paul Petrino, the team's offensive coordinator.

“He’s a Petrino. Tough,” Paul said.

Seeing Bobby Petrino back at work after a serious motorcycle wreck — one that happened without him wearing a helmet — wasn’t even No. 1 on the toughest moments list Paul would compile for his brother. There was a game in college where Petrino suffered a significant knee injury, but kept playing quarterback for the Carroll College Saints.

And Paul knows grit. Remember, he blew out a knee in drills during spring practice last season at Illinois and finished the day's work before seeking medial treatment for an injury that eventually required surgery.

This was, by the way, at least the second time the Petrino brothers have gotten together in a hospital and worked on Xs and Os.

Back when they coached at Louisville, their father and former college football coach, Bob, was undergoing treatment for cancer. So Bobby and Paul gathered up their Cardinals playbooks and worked through them as they waited out their father’s surgery.

There's just not much that can keep this away family from football. Even an accident that left Bobby Petrino in a brush pile on the side of Highway 16 nearly 23 miles outside of Fayetteville.

Doctors released Petrino from the hospital at approximately 11:30 a.m. Tuesday. He was back in the Broyles Center for a meeting with compliance officer Jon Fagg by 2:20 p.m. and then on to a team meeting and other duties before visiting with the press at 3:45 p.m.