USA TODAY Network
It’s been eight years since John Schnatter, the founder of Papa John’s, was forced to exit the company he founded after uttering a racial slur on a conference call. Louisville subsequently severed ties with the man who had been serving on its Board of Trustees, but the two sides are gearing up for a reunion that just so happens to coincide with a major push to return its athletics program to its former glory.
John Schnatter was born and raised in Indiana and attended Ball State University before he started whipping up pizzas in the bar his dad operated in Jeffersonville in 1984. That soon turned into a standalone operation dubbed “Papa John’s,” which he slowly but surely transformed into an empire.
The company went public less than a decade after it was founded and set up its national headquarters across the Kentucky border in the Louisville suburb of Jeffersontown. Schnatter ended up fostering a relationship with the university that takes its name from the state’s biggest city, as the venue where its football team plays was dubbed Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium in 1998 as the result of a $10 million “donation,” and in 2016, he was appointed to the school’s Board of Trustees in 2016.
Schnatter’s term was slated to run until 2021. However, in 2018, he resigned from that role as well as his job as the CEO of the company he’d been running for close to 35 years after uttering the n-word on a conference call (one that was ironically organized to coach him to avoid creating any more public relations issues after he butted heads with the NFL over national anthem protests the previous year).
Louisville quickly distanced itself from the disgraced executive by renaming the football stadium and scrubbing his name from the economic research center he endowed at its business school. However, it appears the school has had a change of heart.
Louisville is rekindling its relationship with John Schattner eight years after it went to great lengths to cut ties with the Papa John’s founder
With the exception of the fairly infamous “Day of Reckoning” interview he conducted in 2019, Schnatter has kept a pretty low profile since the scandal in question. He also didn’t waste any time throwing his support behind Louisville’s fiercest rival after he started to pop up at Kentucky basketball games, but it sounds like he’ll soon be swapping blue for red yet again.
According to WDRB, Louisville President Gerry Bradley recently met with Schnatter and decided the time has come to welcome him back into the fold, as a spokesperson for the school confirmed it has decided to “re-engage” him, saying:
“Recently, we had the opportunity to meet with John, who has contributed greatly to the university and the Louisville community over many years. In that meeting, we learned a lot of facts and details regarding the circumstances that regrettably led to UofL parting ways with John in 2018.
“While we recognize that the decisions made years ago were based on the information available at the time, we have gained a greater perspective of the facts that have emerged since then.
Considering these developments, UofL now acknowledges the university would have approached the situation differently based on our current understanding and believe the best path forward is to unite in our shared commitment to supporting UofL.”
That announcement comes as Louisville’s men’s basketball team has begun to trend in the right direction after Pat Kelsey managed to right the ship that crashed in dramatic fashion during the Kenny Payne Era, and he recently landed two of the biggest names in the transfer portal after poaching Flory Bidunga from Kansas and Jackson Shelstad from Oregon.
That turnaround has coincided with the one Jeff Brohm has managed to stage with the football team, and his performance recently landed him an eight-year contract extension worth close to $65 million.
As is the case with every college program in this day and age, Louisville will take all of the help it can get on the NIL front to keep that momentum going. There’s always a chance this is just a total coincidence and has nothing to do with the fortune the 64-year-old Schnatter has at his disposal, but I’ll let you come to your own conclusion.