Rocky Top Beatdown - The Tennessee Game Thread

[Boarat]

https://x.com/tannerintupelo/status/2109454258722459650/video/1

That's some funny shit. Kinda sounds like an AI Thomas Rhett. Fans haven't even gotten crazy yet. They've got no idea what's coming if they try to let this loser hang around for three years.

[Barton Fink]

That punt was so bad.  I mean if everything had worked perfectly we get the ball back with less than a minute and a half at least 80 yards away with no timeouts.  Have to pass the ball on every down and can't throw to the middle.  Just ridiculous.

But if we convert we have all our timeouts and pretty much have the entire playbook open.  With our offense it's slim pickings either way but the choice is clear. 

It is one of those decisions that only gets worse the more you look at it.

Amen

[animal]

I'm kinda surprised no one has mentioned this-- wasn't the spread 13 1/2?  Maybe Silverfield just wanted to make sure we covered. (I kid, I kid]

It was mentioned

[Too Big Pig]

I think he played to cover the spread for some reason.

Go for it. Don't get it. Greater chance of losing by 14 and the cover the 13.5.

Punt. They more than likely run out the clock instead. The gamblers are happy.

That was me mentioning.  But it can always be mentioned again. 

[DirkPiggler]

Correct. Firing/hiring coaches alone probably isn't gonna make much of a difference in the state we're in. Unless we get lucky.

Coaching matters, but talent moves the needle far more often. You could give RS Georgia's roster and win 9 games. Give our talent to Kirby, etc. and he would be lucky to get 6 wins. Flip coaches in the UGA a couple weeks agao and we still get our ass handed to us. I know we will never have UGA talent. My point is worst coach + best talent vs best coach with worst talent and the best talent will win out.

The SEC landscape has also changed. Prior to aTm and Mizz coming in we were far more competitive. Since their inception, that has been 2 more losses every year on our schedule. We lost USC as a common opponent because of it. Now we've added 2 more programs that are much better than us in TX and OU, and we've added an extra SEC game to the schedule. Winning in this conference today is harder than it has ever been for Arkansas.

Again, I hated the RS hire. HY has failed adapting to the new landscape in college athletics. Get rid of them both if we want, but there's a very good chance we are staring in the same mirror in a year or two.

I vehemently disagree that RS would win 9 games with UGA roster.  Nothing he has shown to date indicates that he would be above .500 with any roster in the SEC. 

But that doesn't matter because even if we had a billion dollar NIL fund we wouldn't ever have a Georgia roster.  Obviously we want as much money as possible, but giving it to someone like Silverfield would be flushing it down the toilet after wiping your ass with it. 

Bielema was the kind of coach where adding that kind of talent would move the needle.  Nutt was to a degree.  Give either of those guys a significantly better roster and they would get some kind of results.  Give them average and they finished .500ish.  If we had a coach like that giving money would be a difference maker.  Obviously if you have a BP-caliber coach giving more money can take you even further.  Until we get a coach who can do something with the money given to him we're spinning our wheels and wasting future resources to throw more money at the problem.  Unless you consider going from 2-10 to 4-8 worth the investment, which I don't. 

Honestly if we had an extra $20MM per year in future marginal revenue we'd be better off to buy out Hunter, hire his replacement then repeat the process with the coaching position once a new AD was in place.  Take one more year of being shitty to set up future success, then give the better coach that extra money in year two. 

[Barton Fink]

You're a lot more optimistic than I am on our leadership abilities and seem to be more complacent with losing. We will very likely hire the next Silverfield and Yuracheck. We keep repeating the same cycle with no results. But this time it will be different, right? We've moved from "wait till next year!" to "wait till the next hire!".

[The Whyte Boar]

HY is so clueless now.  It's really sad.  Not only did he hire a reach, he hamstrung him.  He cut both their throats by guaranteeing a guy almost no one had faith in was going to be bad his first year. 

The formula now is to go big your first year and pull out all the stops to immediately turn over the roster and win in year one.  That's how it's done.  And I would say if you are forced to hire a reach, then you bend over backwards to get him more money so that he can get even better talent. 

HY just does the exact opposite of whatever is the right move.  He is just fucking awful.

[Boarat]

https://x.com/radinabulsi/status/2109303419009630253/video/1?s=46

We watch other teams make good hires and turn it around in a year. Kentucky for god sakes. We've got Silverfish meanwhile Georgia has the coach that tells his team after the game "fuck that shit we don't sit back and run it and punt it back to them we go win the fucking game."

[Barton Fink]

KY hired Stoops (solid hire) and Stein (looks good now) in the last ~10 years. We've hired a fat drunk, a clown, an Oline coach with 0 experience, and another clown. Every coach we've hired has had at least 1 0-fer in conference, right? (since BP)

[DirkPiggler]

You're a lot more optimistic than I am on our leadership abilities and seem to be more complacent with losing. We will very likely hire the next Silverfield and Yuracheck. We keep repeating the same cycle with no results. But this time it will be different, right? We've moved from "wait till next year!" to "wait till the next hire!".

We've hired nine permanent coaches since joining the SEC (counting Crowe who was already here when we moved).  Two of those have had an acceptable level of success - Petrino and to a much lesser degree Nutt.  So 23% of the time we've gotten it right. 

Retaining Yurachek guarantees that we won't be able to test the percentages on your hypothesis.  He's proven himself incapable of managing NIL or raising adequate funds for football.

Keeping Silverfield, regardless of how much player payroll you give him, is guaranteed failure.  Just like keeping Pittman would have been, but arguably with even less chance of success. 

I'll take the 23% chance we strike gold on the next coach over 0% chance that results from giving two retards a blank checkbook all day long. 

As for who is complacent, I'd argue that doing the same thing we've been doing...employing incapable people and hoping they magically improve...is more of a give up strategy than resetting and trying again, even if the odds are low that the next group is any better. 

It's like the AC unit in your house went out in the middle of summer, and you have no clue how to work on it.  You can randomly ask guys walking down the street to help you fix it.  Odds are they are just as lost as you are about it, but you may strike gold and find a capable AC tech.  When he tells you what it takes to fix it you can buy the parts needed to get it working.  Or you can just randomly order a bunch of parts, stack them on top of the unit, and hope that the machine fixes itself. 

[DirkPiggler]

KY hired Stoops (solid hire) and Stein (looks good now) in the last ~10 years. We've hired a fat drunk, a clown, an Oline coach with 0 experience, and another clown. Every coach we've hired has had at least 1 0-fer in conference, right? (since BP)

The solution to continually making bad hires isn't to stick with the last one and hope he morphs into a competent coach. 

Getting rid of the person who made the last few hires is a good place to start.

[buff2.0]

KY hired Stoops (solid hire) and Stein (looks good now) in the last ~10 years. We've hired a fat drunk, a clown, an Oline coach with 0 experience, and another clown. Every coach we've hired has had at least 1 0-fer in conference, right? (since BP)

Stoops wasn't great, but he was stable for 12 years there.  I'm curious how much that actually helped Stein come in with fast success, compared to our "crash and burn and then hire an inexperienced coach to try putting out the fires with a bucket of gas" approach.

[Barton Fink]

I hate RS. He's actually a downgrade from SP, but he's under contract with a $30M buyout. He ain't going anywhere soon. So we know for a couple more years his coaching isn't gonna get us more wins.

We've botched the last two AD hires as well. The one before that gave out golden handcuffs to a clown and ran off the ONLY coach that got us a national title in a major sport during the modern era. So yeah, let's bank on that being the solution.

Something has to change outside of playing musical chairs. Fuck it. I keep saying it. We are who we are.

[animal]

I'll give RS credit...he's clearly going for that big buyout retirement option way sooner than I would have thought.

[Barton Fink]

Stoops wasn't great, but he was stable for 12 years there.  I'm curious how much that actually helped Stein come in with fast success, compared to our "crash and burn and then hire an inexperienced coach to try putting out the fires with a bucket of gas" approach.

That's kinda the point I'm trying to make. There is no stability in our program. We have nothing to sell. Guys like Franklin won't even look in our direction when he's looking for a job. So what can change that narrative now? Cause the longer we wait, the worse that perception is gonna get.

[Boarat]

I'll give RS credit...he's clearly going for that big buyout retirement option way sooner than I would have thought.

Someone needs to hijack the PA system and play this instead of that dumbass Hank Jr song.https://x.com/tannerintupelo/status/2109454258722459650/video/1?s=46

[buff2.0]

That's kinda the point I'm trying to make. There is no stability in our program. We have nothing to sell. Guys like Franklin won't even look in our direction when he's looking for a job. So what can change that narrative now? Cause the longer we wait, the worse that perception is gonna get.

On paper Bert was a far better hire than Stoops, but he didn't pan out here.  Because we're Arkansas, there were wrong decisions to be made, those are our specialty, and so we didn't let him finish out the season before cutting him loose or encouraging him to find another job back up north... and then we hired fucking Chad over any of the guys that kicked his ass every time they played.

It sounds easy but my guess is we need to figure out what our identity is going to be and then go hire a coach to guide that ship for a minimum 4-5 years.  Bobby Petrino in his prime was a Viper ACR who will get you where you wan to go in a hurry but might also overcorrect and slam you headfirst into a wall.  We replaced him with a reliable but slow as shit late-80's F-250, and then that got boring so we traded it in for a rear-ended Pinto that was already on fire.  Could have followed Bobby Prime with an offensive coach - we made the wrong choice and instead got one that acted offensively.  Could have at least tried to follow that Bert/Enos offense up with a power running pro-spread look, instead we made the wrong choice again and got a guy who thought smaller offensive linemen were the secret of the future.  And then we got a career OL coach, and to follow that up and show the fanbase we weren't sorry we hired another guy that was a career OL coach before he fell face first into the Memphis HC job.

We struggle to find coaches because no one knows what the fuck we want to be, so we keep trying to change identities like some kind of shapeshifting skinwalker every few years. 

[HogOfWar]

On paper Bert was a far better hire than Stoops, but he didn't pan out here.  Because we're Arkansas, there were wrong decisions to be made, and those are our specialty, we didn't let him finish out the season before cutting him loose or encouraging him to find another job back up north and then we hired fucking Chad over any of the guys that kicked his ass every time they played.

It sounds easy but my guess is we need to figure out what our identity is going to be and then go hire a coach to guide that ship for a minimum 4-5 years.  Bobby Petrino in his prime was a Viper ACR who will get you where you wan to go in a hurry but might also overcorrect and slam you headfirst into a wall.  We replaced him with a reliable but slow as shit late-80's F-250, and then that got boring so we traded it in for a rear-ended Pinto that was already on fire.  Could have followed Bobby Prime with an offensive coach - we made the wrong choice and instead got one that acted offensively.  Could have at least tried to follow that Bert/Enos offense up with a power running pro-spread look, instead we made the wrong choice again and got a guy who thought smaller offensive linemen were the secret of the future.  And then we got a career OL coach, and to follow that up and show the fanbase we weren't sorry we hired another guy that was a career OL coach fell face first into the Memphis HC job.

We struggle to find coaches because no one knows what the fuck we want to be, so we keep trying to change identities like some kind of shapeshifting skinwalker every few years. 

Bert was fired at the end of the Missouri game which was at the end of the season.

[buff2.0]

Bert was fired at the end of the Missouri game which was at the end of the season.

I didn't type all that to be corrected.

I also could have sworn that we spared him from having to coach that one. 

[HogOfWar]

I didn't type all that to be corrected.

I also could have sworn that we spared him from having to coach that one. 

:TIW:

I was there in the rain. Picked up a classic razorback foam seat left in the north endzone. Saw Peoples walking across the field too.