The first thing I thought when I heard that a resourceful Razorback fan had FOIA’d Houston Nutt’s phone records: Wow, that’s a spectacularly counterproductive waste of time.
Ignore for the moment that the program is returning arguably the best player in all of college football and are the defending SEC West champions (a fluke, I assure you), one thing seems certain: a large portion, if not all of Razorback Nation, wants to see Houston Nutt jobless.
But riddle me this: If Razorback fans are successful in torturing Houston Nutt and causing him enough embarassment that he either quits or is fired — who, in their right mind, is going to want this job?
Let’s not pretend for one second that Arkansas is one of the premier jobs in college football; hell, it’s not even one of the premier jobs in the SEC. Last year was a fluke and it has Razorback fans feeling like they could do better — but they can’t.
Houston Nutt is by no means a great college football coach. He sold his soul to get Mitch Mustain to come to Arkansas and it came back to bite him (he had a little help from Frank Broyles with that blunder).
Once Houston Nutt’s gone, razorback fans will see that the interest in their program from any major college coaches or coordinators is marginal at best. And that’ll be the moment of clarity when they realize that they had a decent coach, the best running back in college football and they ran them both out of Fayetteville.
Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
Pretty dead-on. I’m sure most prospective coaches find the idea of coaching in Fayetteville a bit of a turn-off anyway, but add in nosy boosters and it sounds like hell.
I disagree. I feel Arkansas is a great place to coach. You have a pool of ill talent (look at this year’s draft class and look at past drafts), you have relatively modest expectations (Hog fans went nuts last year after winning the SEC West) and you have the luxury of being, technically, a “basketball school.” Plus, add the fact that the Godfather of ADs is gonorrhea and this is a great stepping stone for a budding coach. Nutt blew it (ha, that was an accident) when he didn’t recruit a solid QB to throw to Monk. You saw what that kid was capable of — one throw and they were that close to beating the Gators — the best team in all the universe. I think someone could take the job and Urban Meyer that bitch. No, I don’t mean go in there and Simon Phoenix the whole program – I mean someone could go in there and make a legend out of himself. Nutt sucks — and he sold himself up the river with the Springdale Boys and now that rabid fan base is out to get him fired.
Come on. You can’t be considered a basketball school because you won one national championship in 1994. Look at what a disaster it was for them to find a new basketball coach. Arkansas has just as many football national championships as basketball. Before all of this madness with Houston Nutt, I might have agreed with you. But in the aftermath of all of this, you’d be crazy to think any coach of serious import would give this job a second look.
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