Schute say it was worth it
- Thread starter Drebin
- Start date
Wins being vacated would barely register for me as a fan.
We really won't know if hiring Freeze was a good gamble or not until after they come off of probation and we see how long it is before they can get going again.
But to play devil's advocate, they had a program that looked like a dumpster fire and had no decent names interested in the position. Other than Freeze, their best case scenario was Hudspeth (who in hindsight probably would have been better, but he also had some NCAA issues at ULL). If you were laying odds on what they were looking at, probably what they should have expected was something between Orgeron and Tubberville, but probably closer to Orgeron than Tubberville. So if you say, hey, what if we can short circuit this and hire a dirty recruiter that can get us back to 8-9 wins a year quickly. We'll probably end up on probation and follow that up with 3-5 years of suck, but we might get 3-5 years of suck right now if we hire an unproven coach that doesn't recruit any dirtier than anybody else in the SEC. If you look at it like that, it doesn't seem like a bad roll of the dice.
Of course now it looks like the NCAA is going to levy a punishment where 5 years of suck is the best case scenario, but let's say they strike lightning in a bottle with a coaching hire right after scholly reductions are one, and they are winning 6 games in year 6 and 8 games in year 7. Does it still look like a terrible trade? I think that's a pretty decent tradeoff.
On the flipside, let's say Mullen capitalizes on UM's probation and we win 8 games a year for the next five years and then they hire a bad coach, and we get another 4 to 5 years of success while they languish. At that point, that could create a lasting influence on the balance of power between the two schools that is hard for UM to overcome.
I don't expect either of those extremes to happen, and I expect when it's all over, it will have been a bad trade, but not a ridiculously bad tradeoff.
This isn't the fear, who cares about a few years of suck. The fear should be looking at USM. USM was ale to hang with the SEC for years because they could recruit decently in the state of Mississippi. No one had momentum to be "the" team in the state. But USM got greedy and canned Bower because they wanted MOAR and they slipped in recruiting. They got behind and then never could catch back up because they lost momentum (I know conference shifts didn't help either). The fear for Ole Miss is that they lose momentum in Mississippi, which we already see happening, and MSU maintains the stability under Mullen and emerges as "the" team in Mississippi. With the NCAA on watch they won't be able to recruit nationally anymore and if Mississippi recruits see MSU as the place to play the could slide into Vandy territory really quickly.
Here's a question, Rebs: was it worth it to hire Houston Nutt?
1. Football wasteland the year before the new coach/savior got there? 0-8 SEC in Coach O's last year. Check.
2. Beat top-ranked and eventual national champs in savior's first year? Remember the Tebow speech? Check.
3. Program turned around seemingly overnight? 9-4 first year. Check.
4. Back to back big bowl wins? Cotton, twice. Done.
5. Shakily built team predictably falters under increasingly heavy burden of false hype, uber-emotion, and unwarranted "Ole Miss" expectations at the end of his tenure? Yup.
6. Man of Great Integrity turns out to not really be that awesome to you and craters the whole program? Ummm, checkity check check.
I just think it's funny that people think there's a huge difference between Freezus and Houston Nutt.
In fact, I sense a pattern here. Rebs, did you ever think it might not be the coach, whoever the savior-of-the-day is -- it might just be who you are? Please hire Freeze back, but before you do, take a good look in the mirror.
1. Football wasteland the year before the new coach/savior got there? 0-8 SEC in Coach O's last year. Check.
2. Beat top-ranked and eventual national champs in savior's first year? Remember the Tebow speech? Check.
3. Program turned around seemingly overnight? 9-4 first year. Check.
4. Back to back big bowl wins? Cotton, twice. Done.
5. Shakily built team predictably falters under increasingly heavy burden of false hype, uber-emotion, and unwarranted "Ole Miss" expectations at the end of his tenure? Yup.
6. Man of Great Integrity turns out to not really be that awesome to you and craters the whole program? Ummm, checkity check check.
I just think it's funny that people think there's a huge difference between Freezus and Houston Nutt.
In fact, I sense a pattern here. Rebs, did you ever think it might not be the coach, whoever the savior-of-the-day is -- it might just be who you are? Please hire Freeze back, but before you do, take a good look in the mirror.
Shute is by far my favorite twitter warrior out of all the Ole Miss twitter warriors. I'm still not quite convinced that he's a real person.
I watched The Identity Theft of Mitch Mustain last night- didn't like the production, but it was interesting.
I said from day one he was a horrible hire, but seeing how he handled the Mitch Mustain situation made me realize how incredibly poor of a hire he was by Ole Miss.
Good post.
Vacated wins will definitely make a difference for many fans of both, especially those who talk smack on the message boards. For those who don't talk smack in real life to OM fans, the message boards is the only place for it. If OM has to vacate wins and then has a few bad years, the MSU fan narrative against OM fans will be "we have xx vs your y wins in the past 10 years", etc. Plus a lot of other stats, hopefully good ones for State and not just against OM. For those who don't talk smack in real life to OM fans, that will be fun (and would bug me if I were an OM fan). For a while all they had was the overall rivalry record, then they had a Sugar Bowl win and "Freeze is 3-1 vs State" (which was soon to become 3-2). Now they've lost Freeze, and will again be reduced to only the overall record.
The best case scenario for OM after firing Nutt would have been to hire an honest head coach. They and the new head coach were already going to be investigated starting in 2013 because the NCAA was on to their ACT cheating from before 2013. If they had hired an honest coach instead of Freeze and not bought blue chip players in 2013, they'd probably already be off probation from the ACT fraud and the NCAA not finding anything else.
The fact that he had to leave that batshit-crazy attack dog ***** that did his bidding in Arkansas was what spelled his doom in Mississippi.
I don't think USM is relevant at all. If they suck for ten years and MSU pulls ahead decisively as to being the premier football school in Mississippi, UM will still be basically Kentucky football. That won't be good, but it's good enough that they will be within striking distance if they get the right coach. I just don't think MSU or UM is going to separate from the other by anything that can't be overcome with one good coach (provided the conference landscape continues where there are only a handful of traditional powers that could even think about poaching an SEC coach at a school other than Vandy or UK).
If we do end up separating ourselves, I would guess it will be as much because the heavily out of state tilt of UM's student body results in more and more of the state being MSU country.