Noah.Dreams
12-08-2007, 10:36 AM
Arkansas' coach search is all to familiar to Alabama fans
A sports-fanatic friends and sometime columnists JR and Henry are back with their view of the coaching search mess going on in Fayetteville:
JR and Henry: Arkansas Football Is Nowhere
When Houston Nutt announced that he was quitting as the head football coach at Arkansas, it seemed to be the perfect, amicable end to a relationship that at one time sweet, was now bitter. There was too much friction in Razorback nation, and very little return for it. Averaging 7.5 wins over a 10-year span that included zero SEC championships and zero BCS bowl berths simply wasn't enough to overcome the pressures of being the head football coach at Arkansas. In the end, Houston Nutt couldn't handle the heat and he left.
And that made perfect sense to us (it still does, even as Nutt furnishes his new home in Oxford), but what doesn't make any sense is all that ensued just moments after Nutt stepped away from the podium.
UA Chancellor John White announced that Nutt was receiving $3.5 million (the amount he would have been owed had the UA fired him) to quit. White, in rationalizing the matter, said that he wanted Houston Nutt and his family to be in no worse position for making what White characterized, as a "family decision."
Within a matter of minutes, however, rumors swirled that Nutt was about to named the next head coach at Ole Miss, a perennial loser of a program long dominated by just about everyone in the SEC West.
For the record, it doesn't bother us a bit that Nutt is at Ole Miss. He'll average 7.5 wins there too, and they'll soon get tired of his rah-rah act. After all, what Ole Miss needs right now is a head cheerleader who can win more than he loses. In the age of four non-conference games (and you can bet that Nutt will schedule four cupcakes), winning 6-7 games year-in and year-out isn't tough. What's tough is winning championships, and Nutt never managed to do that at Arkansas.
What makes this so perplexing that is that Nutt was given a $3.5 million golden parachute for what, exactly? After all, he was given a pay raise at Ole Miss and a longer deal, so it's hard to argue that quitting and taking the job at Ole Miss was bad for his family.
And then it was reported that Nutt could use of some of Arkansas' assistants to help him recruit. Nutt promised he wouldn't recruit players away from Arkansas, of course.
Are you serious?
But hey, we can't blame Nutt. If we walked into that kind of deal, we'd take it in a heartbeat - dream job or not. Money's money, especially when people are willing to give it to you for nothing, with no attachments and for reasons that wouldn't make sense even to the kindest of souls. Kudos, Houston. Enjoy it.
And that brings us to the issue at hand: if Chancellor White was willing, in effect, to pay for Houston to quit (and with no strings attached), he had to have a "name" coach waiting in the wings, right? After all, even a circus clown knows that you don't get rid of a guy who just won 8 games, beat the No. 1 in the nation on national TV and has a Heisman trophy finalist on his team unless you have a sure thing waiting on I-540 ready to roll into town.
Well, Hog fans, Chancellor White's proven to be even less competent than we believed in these matters. And Jeff Long, who might want to call Pitt and see if he can get his old job back, has managed to do just as poorly.
Immediately after Nutt's resignation it was presumed that North Carolina coach and Springdale native Butch Davis would be in Fayetteville accepting the keys to the kingdom. But those rumors quickly went by the wayside when Davis accepted a contract extension at UNC (forget that leaving a school after only one season would be near career suicide for Davis).
Then attention turned to Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville, the guy White, Broyles and that silly selection committee passed over 10 years ago for a guy with a losing record at Boise State (and one year of Division 1 coaching experience). Despite rumors that Tuberville was ready to dump Auburn (and we think he should be ready after what happened a few years back), he signed a contract extension. He's at Auburn to stay, or at least until Bobby Petrino gets run out of Atlanta.
Earlier this week it was reported that Jeff Long had secured Clemson coach Tommy Bowden, a luke warm has-been who's been on the hot seat at Clemson about as long as he's been there. We shook our heads. The search had clearly gone south. If Tommy Bowden was the answer, Arkansas football had truly gone down the tubes.
But then he turned the Hogs down, and we cheered ... for a moment.
Bowden was exactly the wrong guy for the job, but by declining to take the job it further demonstrated something we've suggested before: that Arkansas is no longer a top tier football program. If Arkansas can't even convince an underachiever like Tommy Bowden to come and coach, things must be in really bad shape.
And to make matters worse, Thursday morning Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe took the job and then promptly pulled a Dana Altman and stayed put in Winston-Salem, N.C. That's twice in one year that a coach has reneged on Arkansas.
Give us a break.
Sadly, the answer to Arkansas's head coaching woes lies in our own unpleasant past. Ten years ago, Arkansas had a chance to get a proven winner from an SEC school with a national championship pedigree. They didn't. You can blame a lot of folks for that, but the two that deserve the most heat are Wally Hall of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Danny Ford, the former coach of the Hogs.
Ford was an inept hick who couldn't remember his player's names. On top of the fact that he couldn't coach, he didn't care to spend anytime cultivating the fan base. He skipped Razorback Club meetings, gatherings with key donors, players' families and friends, and he called everyone by their number.
It seemed that all that was required of the next coach was to be the opposite of Danny Ford in the personality department (as opposed to the opposite in the winning department). In fact, Orville Henry quoted one committee captain as saying, ""I do believe that he [Houston Nutt] won us over with something Danny hardly ever had showed us: his enthusiasm, his lack of negativism."
Don't bother with wins and losses, fellas. It's all about who loves the helmet, and who will proclaim it to the heavens the loudest!
Wally Hall made it easy for the committee to back Nutt. He wrote column after column chastising Tuberville as a guy who only rode around in limos and cared more about himself than his players. Essentially, Wally managed to make Tuberville synonymous with Ford, which simply remarkable. Wally even declared Nutt an "innovative and offensive genius."
And the tide turned.
Upon the announcement of Nutt as the coach, Orville Henry wrote, "He's the only Arkansas coach whose choice was based on emotion, not reason or the facts of the matter." Henry questioned Nutt's losing record at Boise versus Tuberville's winning record at Ole Miss, among other things.
Hall and many of the members of the committee simply weren't listening.
Today, Arkansas football sits hopeless in Fayetteville with no real direction and certainly no answers that will appease and unite the entire fan base. Criticizing a decision 10 years in the past doesn't solve anything, and we realize that. However, it's important to understand how Arkansas got here, and why.
So what should the UA do now?
Clearly with no decent head coach willing to consider Arkansas the UA needs to hire the best assistant out there. Our vote is for Charlie Strong, the defensive coordinator at Florida and a Batesville native. He's worked for Lou Holtz, Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer. Every one of those guys has a national championship under his belt.
Or Arkansas could hire that stay-puffed Tazmanian devil Reggie Herring. And the era of Jack Crowe/Joe Kines/Danny Ford II could begin in laughable style.
Maybe a good laugh is what Arkansas fans need right now.
(JR and Henry are a couple of Little Rock-based sports fans who want to get their written opinion out, and we provide the space. They also hope to see their name linked to the Arkansas opening, even casually, so their respective employers will give them a raise.)
A sports-fanatic friends and sometime columnists JR and Henry are back with their view of the coaching search mess going on in Fayetteville:
JR and Henry: Arkansas Football Is Nowhere
When Houston Nutt announced that he was quitting as the head football coach at Arkansas, it seemed to be the perfect, amicable end to a relationship that at one time sweet, was now bitter. There was too much friction in Razorback nation, and very little return for it. Averaging 7.5 wins over a 10-year span that included zero SEC championships and zero BCS bowl berths simply wasn't enough to overcome the pressures of being the head football coach at Arkansas. In the end, Houston Nutt couldn't handle the heat and he left.
And that made perfect sense to us (it still does, even as Nutt furnishes his new home in Oxford), but what doesn't make any sense is all that ensued just moments after Nutt stepped away from the podium.
UA Chancellor John White announced that Nutt was receiving $3.5 million (the amount he would have been owed had the UA fired him) to quit. White, in rationalizing the matter, said that he wanted Houston Nutt and his family to be in no worse position for making what White characterized, as a "family decision."
Within a matter of minutes, however, rumors swirled that Nutt was about to named the next head coach at Ole Miss, a perennial loser of a program long dominated by just about everyone in the SEC West.
For the record, it doesn't bother us a bit that Nutt is at Ole Miss. He'll average 7.5 wins there too, and they'll soon get tired of his rah-rah act. After all, what Ole Miss needs right now is a head cheerleader who can win more than he loses. In the age of four non-conference games (and you can bet that Nutt will schedule four cupcakes), winning 6-7 games year-in and year-out isn't tough. What's tough is winning championships, and Nutt never managed to do that at Arkansas.
What makes this so perplexing that is that Nutt was given a $3.5 million golden parachute for what, exactly? After all, he was given a pay raise at Ole Miss and a longer deal, so it's hard to argue that quitting and taking the job at Ole Miss was bad for his family.
And then it was reported that Nutt could use of some of Arkansas' assistants to help him recruit. Nutt promised he wouldn't recruit players away from Arkansas, of course.
Are you serious?
But hey, we can't blame Nutt. If we walked into that kind of deal, we'd take it in a heartbeat - dream job or not. Money's money, especially when people are willing to give it to you for nothing, with no attachments and for reasons that wouldn't make sense even to the kindest of souls. Kudos, Houston. Enjoy it.
And that brings us to the issue at hand: if Chancellor White was willing, in effect, to pay for Houston to quit (and with no strings attached), he had to have a "name" coach waiting in the wings, right? After all, even a circus clown knows that you don't get rid of a guy who just won 8 games, beat the No. 1 in the nation on national TV and has a Heisman trophy finalist on his team unless you have a sure thing waiting on I-540 ready to roll into town.
Well, Hog fans, Chancellor White's proven to be even less competent than we believed in these matters. And Jeff Long, who might want to call Pitt and see if he can get his old job back, has managed to do just as poorly.
Immediately after Nutt's resignation it was presumed that North Carolina coach and Springdale native Butch Davis would be in Fayetteville accepting the keys to the kingdom. But those rumors quickly went by the wayside when Davis accepted a contract extension at UNC (forget that leaving a school after only one season would be near career suicide for Davis).
Then attention turned to Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville, the guy White, Broyles and that silly selection committee passed over 10 years ago for a guy with a losing record at Boise State (and one year of Division 1 coaching experience). Despite rumors that Tuberville was ready to dump Auburn (and we think he should be ready after what happened a few years back), he signed a contract extension. He's at Auburn to stay, or at least until Bobby Petrino gets run out of Atlanta.
Earlier this week it was reported that Jeff Long had secured Clemson coach Tommy Bowden, a luke warm has-been who's been on the hot seat at Clemson about as long as he's been there. We shook our heads. The search had clearly gone south. If Tommy Bowden was the answer, Arkansas football had truly gone down the tubes.
But then he turned the Hogs down, and we cheered ... for a moment.
Bowden was exactly the wrong guy for the job, but by declining to take the job it further demonstrated something we've suggested before: that Arkansas is no longer a top tier football program. If Arkansas can't even convince an underachiever like Tommy Bowden to come and coach, things must be in really bad shape.
And to make matters worse, Thursday morning Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe took the job and then promptly pulled a Dana Altman and stayed put in Winston-Salem, N.C. That's twice in one year that a coach has reneged on Arkansas.
Give us a break.
Sadly, the answer to Arkansas's head coaching woes lies in our own unpleasant past. Ten years ago, Arkansas had a chance to get a proven winner from an SEC school with a national championship pedigree. They didn't. You can blame a lot of folks for that, but the two that deserve the most heat are Wally Hall of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and Danny Ford, the former coach of the Hogs.
Ford was an inept hick who couldn't remember his player's names. On top of the fact that he couldn't coach, he didn't care to spend anytime cultivating the fan base. He skipped Razorback Club meetings, gatherings with key donors, players' families and friends, and he called everyone by their number.
It seemed that all that was required of the next coach was to be the opposite of Danny Ford in the personality department (as opposed to the opposite in the winning department). In fact, Orville Henry quoted one committee captain as saying, ""I do believe that he [Houston Nutt] won us over with something Danny hardly ever had showed us: his enthusiasm, his lack of negativism."
Don't bother with wins and losses, fellas. It's all about who loves the helmet, and who will proclaim it to the heavens the loudest!
Wally Hall made it easy for the committee to back Nutt. He wrote column after column chastising Tuberville as a guy who only rode around in limos and cared more about himself than his players. Essentially, Wally managed to make Tuberville synonymous with Ford, which simply remarkable. Wally even declared Nutt an "innovative and offensive genius."
And the tide turned.
Upon the announcement of Nutt as the coach, Orville Henry wrote, "He's the only Arkansas coach whose choice was based on emotion, not reason or the facts of the matter." Henry questioned Nutt's losing record at Boise versus Tuberville's winning record at Ole Miss, among other things.
Hall and many of the members of the committee simply weren't listening.
Today, Arkansas football sits hopeless in Fayetteville with no real direction and certainly no answers that will appease and unite the entire fan base. Criticizing a decision 10 years in the past doesn't solve anything, and we realize that. However, it's important to understand how Arkansas got here, and why.
So what should the UA do now?
Clearly with no decent head coach willing to consider Arkansas the UA needs to hire the best assistant out there. Our vote is for Charlie Strong, the defensive coordinator at Florida and a Batesville native. He's worked for Lou Holtz, Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer. Every one of those guys has a national championship under his belt.
Or Arkansas could hire that stay-puffed Tazmanian devil Reggie Herring. And the era of Jack Crowe/Joe Kines/Danny Ford II could begin in laughable style.
Maybe a good laugh is what Arkansas fans need right now.
(JR and Henry are a couple of Little Rock-based sports fans who want to get their written opinion out, and we provide the space. They also hope to see their name linked to the Arkansas opening, even casually, so their respective employers will give them a raise.)