Mike Celizic

Bobby Petrino couldn’t even wait until this miserable season is over before abandoning the sinking ship Atlanta Falcons. But if his timing is less than ideal, it’s probably fitting. Atlanta began the season by losing its star quarterback, Michael Vick, has lurched into week 14 with a 3-10 record, is playing to thousands of empty seats and is headed nowhere. Oh, I almost forgot: the city is running out of water, too.

Look, it’s rancid what Petrino did. Coaches are always talking about character and how real men never give up. Play every game hard to the final whistle, even if you’re losing by 40 points and you’re eliminated from the playoffs three games into the season. Isn’t that what they preach?

And there he goes, skeedaddling out of town with three games left in the season, telling the guys he asked to work for him that he’s through working for them. Maybe he’ll justify it by saying he has to think of his family — that’s what weasels usually say.

So the Falcons and Atlanta have a right to be madder than a wolverine with a hemorrhoid attack at Petrino for running out on them to leap on the Arkansas job. But they shouldn’t be. In truth, the team got what it should have expected — and what it deserved — when it was so foolish as to hire a college coach to do an NFL job.

It was pretty much doomed from the start. Taking a coach from the college world and throwing him into the pros usually is. It’s like hiring a French chef to run a sushi bar — both are restaurants, but there are subtle differences.

It’s not that it can’t be done. But there are so many examples of college coaches failing in the pros, from Lou Holtz to Steve Spurrier to Nick Saban and now to Petrino, that you wonder why any team bothers to take the chance. It doesn’t even work that often in basketball, as Rick Pitino and John Calipari could tell you. The games go by the same name, but to think they’re the same game is foolish.

Even going the other way doesn’t always work out. Pete Carroll thrived when he went from the pros to the college ranks as the coach at USC, but he always seemed a college coach at heart. Charlie Weis, who viewed himself as the total pro coach, hasn’t done very well in college.

You’d think teams would have noticed this by now, and most of them have. Most NFL teams who need a new head coach have the good sense to grab one from the pro ranks — usually a pro coordinator who’s been tabbed as an up-and-comer. For those less adventurous, there’s always a few recycled head coaches wandering around the unemployment office.

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If you want a college coach, you bring him up as an assistant and let him learn the pro game and get used to the hours, which are around the clock and the calendar. There are other things to get used to — like the fact that in the pros, the players buy their own cars and you don’t have to find them summer jobs — but the big thing is the complexity of the pro game and the enormous number of hours it takes to get the job done.

What you don’t do is take a college head coach and give him a professional team to run. The odds of it working are the same as a box of Krispy Kremes surviving the shift change at a cop shop.

It’s one of those things that no matter how good it sounds, you don’t do it.

Atlanta thought it had a perfect reason to take the risk. Petrino was a college coach from Louisville, and the geniuses running the team thought that a college-oriented coach would be better able to install an offense that Vick could thrive in.

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Of course, Vick had the bad sense to get himself arrested an thrown in prison, so Petrino’s familiarity with college offenses was rendered not only useless, but a liability. That was yet another reason why he shouldn’t have been hired in the first place — there was always a chance Vick would get hurt and the team would have to play like the rest of the pro teams, in which case Petrino would be a liability, not the asset the team imagined he would be.

In any event, there was never a good reason to hire him. It was always more risk than promise from the day he signed on the dotted line. And the way he left only proves what an awful idea it was from the start.

So go ahead and get mad, Atlanta. You’ve had a bad year, you need to vent, and Petrino certainly has earned your wrath.

But you’re the guys who hired him. You can say you didn’t deserve this, but you also have no right to be surprised. Just be glad he left now; if he’d waited till the end of the season, he may have been tempted to stay, and that, you really didn’t want.