Former Louisville coach Steve Kragthorpe dies at 59

Former Louisville coach Steve Kragthorpe died Monday. He was 59.

The longtime college football coach was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease over a decade ago. After playing quarterback at Eastern New Mexico and West Texas, Kragthorpe got into coaching in the 1990s for a career that spanned over 30 years.

After starting at Northern Arizona, Kragthorpe was an offensive assistant at North Texas and Boston College. He became Texas A&M’s quarterbacks coach in 1997 and then served as the team’s offensive coordinator for three seasons before he was hired by the Buffalo Bills as their quarterbacks coach.

Kragthorpe spent two seasons with the Bills before getting his first head-coaching job. Tulsa hired Kragthorpe to turn around a team that had gone 2-23 in 2001 and 2002.

He did just that. Tulsa won at least eight games in three of Kragthorpe’s four seasons. The Golden Hurricane were 8-5 in his first season and even went 9-4 in 2005 while scoring the team’s first bowl win since 1991.

Kragthorpe’s success got him the head-coaching job at Louisville, though the Cardinals never had a winning season in his three years with the team. Louisville was 6-6 in 2007 and lost one fewer game in each of the next two seasons. He was fired at the end of the 2008 season with a career record of 15-21 with the program.

After a year out of football, Kragthorpe was hired at LSU as the team’s offensive coordinator in January of 2011. However, Kragthorpe stepped down from that position in August after his Parkinson’s diagnosis. He stayed on as the team’s QBs coach for 2011 and 2012 before moving into a non-coaching capacity with the Tigers.

In 2018, members of the LSU program came to Kragthorpe’s defense after the Tigers’ 74-72 seven-overtime loss to Texas A&M. As fans stormed the field, Cole Fisher, the nephew of former Aggies coach Jimbo Fisher and a student manager at the time, made contact with Kragthorpe’s chest, where Kragthorpe’s brain pacemaker was located. The contact from Fisher to Kragthorpe then led to an LSU player and coach Kevin Faulk punching Fisher.