The Elephant in the Room Part II

[Gambler]

Thank you. It's always nice to see that some things never change.

I bet Bert has a big old buyout clause too.  Edit: Nope, only 3mm.

That's a lot of all you can eat buffets.

[jdcatty]

I assume this is the (potential) Hog head coaching search thread. Fayvillians has a list of potential coaches to watch this weekend:


Coach Watch
If you've given up on the current Arkansas regime, it's hard to blame you. But hope springs eternal, so you'd probably rather watch potential Razorback coaching candidates in action. After all, no one wants to get into Flight Tracking Season and realize they don't actually know anything about the top candidates. Here are some options for you, as several of them have very big games this week.


Liberty at Jacksonville State (Tuesday, 6:30 pm, ESPNU). You may remember Jamey Chadwell, who was the interim coach at Coastal Carolina in 2017 when the Chanticleers came to Fayetteville and nearly beat the Hogs, who were saved in what can only be called The TJ Hammonds Game. Chadwell eventually got the full-time gig and had a pair of 11-win seasons for Coastal, and now has Liberty 5-0 in his first season. The Gamecocks of Jacksonville State are 5-1 in their first FBS season, so this should be a good matchup.

Tulane at Memphis (Friday, 6 pm, ESPN). Willie Fritz was widely thought of as a candidate for the job back in 2020, and for good reason. Since that time, he's added a New Year's Six bowl to his resume (the Green Wave took down USC in the Cotton Bowl last year). He's 63, but he's been a winner at every stop: two FCS title game appearances at Sam Houston, an 8-0 Sun Belt record in Georgia Southern's second season in the FBS, and now 16-3 in the last two seasons at Tulane. The winner of this game is probably the American favorite.

Indiana at Michigan (Saturday, 11 am, FOX). Watch Michigan to check out their defense, which ranks #1 in our model. Defensive coordinator Jesse Minter was in fact born in Little Rock, though his connections to the Natural State are minimal, as he did not grow up here (he grew up in Indiana). His father Rick was a GA for Lou Holtz at Arkansas in 1978. Anyway, Minter spent four years on John Harbaugh's Ravens staff and has coordinated the Wolverine defense since 2022. Would be actually be a candidate? No idea, but I like watching good football, and Michigan plays good football.

Kansas at Oklahoma State (Saturday, 2:30 pm, FS1). The obvious first call for the Hogs should there be a coaching search would be Lance Leipold, a guy who just wins. He went 109-6 as the head coach of Division III Wisconsin-Whitewater, winning six national titles in eight seasons. Buffalo gave him a chance at the FBS level, and he delivered MAC East titles in his fourth and sixth seasons at the helm. Now at Kansas, he took over the Power 5's most moribund program and quickly went from 2-10 to 6-7 to 5-1 this year. A win over Oklahoma State would ensure the Jayhawks bowl eligibility for the second straight year.

UNLV at Nevada (Saturday, 4 pm). I doubt Barry Odom would be a serious candidate unless top options all said no, but the work he's doing in Las Vegas is impressive. The Rebels are 4-1 after more than a decade of bad football (UNLV hasn't been good since they beat Arkansas in 2000 Las Vegas Bowl). Odom's defense is massively improved, but all eyes are on his innovative offensive coordinator, Brennan Marion, whose "GoGo offense" has been really influential in coaching circles in the last few years. Marion, just 36, is almost certainly going to get a Power 5 offensive coordinator job this offseason. I tend to think that Marion's scheme is exactly what Arkansas needs to succeed, so I've been following the Rebels closely all year. A retained Sam Pittman could look to Marion to replace Dan Enos, or Odom, if hired, could try to lure him to Fayetteville.

UL Monroe at Texas State (Saturday, 6 pm, ESPN+). Deion Sanders' total rebuild at Colorado is getting all the attention, but new head coach GJ Kinne did the same thing at Texas State, bringing in an army of transfers to transform a program. Kinne, a former Tulsa quarterback under Gus Malzahn, is just 34 years old, but his rebuilt Bobcat squad stunned Baylor in his first game as coach and are off to a 4-2 start. Kinne spent the 2018 season as an offensive analyst on Chad Morris's staff at Arkansas and was Malzahn's offensive coordinator at UCF in 2021. In his only season as Incarnate Word's coach (2022), he took the Cardinals to the FCS Semifinals. The obvious downside to Kinne is that he's been a head coach for all of two seasons, and just one at the FBS level, but his teams are fun to watch.

NC State at Duke (Saturday, 7 pm, ACC Network). If the lack of connections to great programs from Leipold, Fritz, and Chadwell are a concern for you, consider Mike Elko, who has coordinated defenses for powerhouse programs (Notre Dame in 2018 and Texas A&M in 2019-2021), is a Power 5 head coach (Duke), and has proven he can win at a historically-disadvantaged program (13-5 in two seasons). The Blue Devils are 4-1 and have a win over Clemson and a close loss to Notre Dame.


https://www.fayvillains.com/2023/10/10/the-week-ahead-week-7-2/

Elko, with someone like Brennan Marion as OC would be very intriguing.

Can't believe no one is mentioning Jeff Traylor.  He's doing a great job at UTSA.  Knows Arkansas, is beloved in East Texas, one of our biggest recruiting areas. 

[animal]

Why do people keep mentioning Fritz?

Not only is he older than Sam, he's been at Tulane for nearly a decade and has had ONE good year.

Here's his year by year record at Tulane:

4-8
5-7
7-6
7-6
6-6
2-10
12-2

Other than the 12-2 he sounds perfect

[Pig Benis]

Can't believe no one is mentioning Jeff Traylor.  He's doing a great job at UTSA.  Knows Arkansas, is beloved in East Texas, one of our biggest recruiting areas. 

Agree but he was here with Chad and that's a tough stench to overcome.

[Thin Red Swine]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/other/illinois-woes-begin-and-end-with-bret-bielema/ar-AA1i89V4?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=6123ce8bc0604cdb8bd53695b07381d4&ei=27

just a little day lightener for this dreary thread

It can always be worse.

"Several red zone mistakes, including one poorly-timed interception, misconstrued Illinois' (2-4, 0-3 Big Ten) offensive attack."

I just love when people use big words incorrectly. 

This is an example of using it right...

"Dan Enos misconstrued how to build a successful game plan against SEC defenses, which led to his eventual demise."

[egregious]

and that is a guy who makes at least part of his living from,..., wait for it,..., writing

[FNG]

"Several red zone mistakes, including one poorly-timed interception, misconstrued Illinois' (2-4, 0-3 Big Ten) offensive attack."

I'm going to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume his transcriptionist misconstrued "miserably screwed".

[Texzilla]

This makes sense.  You can't let a coach survive 1-7 or 0-8 in his fourth year or later.  In fact you should have an 0-8 clause written into every coach's contract where you have the option to fire for cause with no buyout if that happens even in year one.  We've had exactly two coaches who have gone 0-8 at Arkansas, and hindsight tells us we would have been better off firing both of them as soon as they did it the first time.

Besides the 0-8/1-7 clause I would include loss to any noncon pattycake would require coach to go to midfield and commit seppuku while the band played Hey Jude. 

[animal]

bump


Hopefully Sam will just fall on his sword.

[Cardiac Hog]

Pittman is looking 0-8 in SEC straight in the face.

[Cornhogio]

Pittman is looking 0-8 in SEC straight in the face.

Indeed.  Really sucks considering he ran his mouth pretty big going into the season.

[Son of Spam]

Indeed.  Really sucks considering he ran his mouth pretty big going into the season.

It is amazing what money does to coaches. I guess I can understand. If I made that kind of money and didn't really have to do shit to earn it, I guess I would suck (if I was close to retirement age), too.

[Hizog]

Hopefully Pittman hiring Sexton turned his friendship with Yurachek into a business relationship, and now Hunter can make the easy business decision.

[Son of Spam]

Why keep Sam another year when he knows he will probably be fired after next year. Looking at that, I don't even see him trying. Cut bait now and start over....again.

[Feral]

Why keep Sam another year when he knows he will probably be fired after next year. Looking at that, I don't even see him trying. Cut bait now and start over....again.

No reason to hold on to him and have a lame duck coach situation like we had in 2017 with Bert where he'd given up.

[animal]

Why keep Sam another year when he knows he will probably be fired after next year. Looking at that, I don't even see him trying. Cut bait now and start over....again.

Really in my mind there are only two things that can happen before the first of the year...

1. We clean house including firing Sam, though it would be nice to keep this DC/staff

OR

2. We send Enos packing and go find us a god damn fucking OC that knows they'll probably be the HC in a couple years. Let that OC bring his own people. It's unlikely anyone worth a damn is going to come coach for a lame duck head coach though so it wont work. You'd literally have to get someone like Kendall Briles back and give him the dreaded coach in waiting tag.


Under Chad I felt like our talent was way down...we were snake bit many times and his teams quit early and often. Pittman's players aren't quitting, we just don't play overly smart and I feel like to the trained eye there is talent here and decisions were made that ultimately led to this horrific season. Every coach that comes here is going to be faced with recruiting misses and actual fuck ups from prior staffs...the portal thing helps speed that cycle up to over come it but in this past case the fuck ups were made in 2020 and 2021 and weren't recognized until fall of 2023. The same shit could happen to the next staff and the next one after that and so on. We have to have a coaching staff that thinks like a pro staff much like Muss goes about things.

[DrMongoose]

Hunter hired Sam then gave him a stupid extension for winning 9 games with 6th year Covid seniors who came back while everyone else's went pro and no one was trying to hire him.

Hunter is as guilty as Sam regarding the state of the football program and is about to find out why he gets that $1 million plus salary. Did he say no to a briles raise?


But hey we have big bar at the top of the south end zone!

[bigpig]

Hiring a different OC won't fix the real problem, which is the HC in year 4 still making the same mistakes in crunch time.

He can't think fast under pressure.

[Feral]

Hunter hired Sam then gave him a stupid extension for winning 9 games with 6th year Covid seniors who came back while everyone else's went pro and no one was trying to hire him.

Hunter is as guilty as Sam regarding the state of the football program and is about to find out why he gets that $1 million plus salary. Did he say no to a briles raise?


But hey we have big bar at the top of the south end zone!

Thank you.

I've been saying this in light of all the Yurachek fanboys for the last year.

The guy didn't do or say shit during nearly 2 years of the Morris era. Just pulled a Homer Simpson fading into the bushes, and occasionally tweeted some bullshit about "real fans" (remember that?) and spewing bullshit in a Touchdown Club meeting about how he'd fire a coach "for cause" for losing (which is empty pandering).

Then he fucked up the coaching search, got cheap, and got cowed by a bunch of former players into hiring a career OL coach who had one foot in retirement.

After being MIA for the Morris era, he's suddenly in the locker room and in every video after a win. To your point, he got absolutely played in Pittman's extension when no one was interested in him.

Of course, right on cue, we're losing and he's MIA again despite our football program coming apart at the seams and Pittman putting on a weekly clinic on terrible coaching.

I'm not bullish at all on Yurachek making the right decision or a good hire. 

[vegashog]

Thank you.

I've been saying this in light of all the Yurachek fanboys for the last year.

The guy didn't do or say shit during nearly 2 years of the Morris era. Just pulled a Homer Simpson fading into the bushes, and occasionally tweeted some bullshit about "real fans" (remember that?) and spewing bullshit in a Touchdown Club meeting about how he'd fire a coach "for cause" for losing (which is empty pandering).

Then he fucked up the coaching search, got cheap, and got cowed by a bunch of former players into hiring a career OL coach who had one foot in retirement.

After being MIA for the Morris era, he's suddenly in the locker room and in every video after a win. To your point, he got absolutely played in Pittman's extension when no one was interested in him.

Of course, right on cue, we're losing and he's MIA again despite our football program coming apart at the seams and Pittman putting on a weekly clinic on terrible coaching.

I'm not bullish at all on Yurachek making the right decision or a good hire. 

this all horseshit.

he fired morris before the end of his second season. he canned him when he should have, anytime sooner would not have done a fucking thing.

he was not going to fire pittman prior to this game so all this little girl hair on fire shit is just that.

he didn't go cheap or fucked up the search, that has been covered ad nauseum on here. again you cherry pick what you want and ignore the other players involved in the whole hiring process.

the raise was everyone in the athletic department's 'fault'. and once more, unless you and the others on here that bitch about a coach's salary are on the foundation's speed dial, what the hell does it matter. they are all overpaid.

if all that makes me a 'fanboy', then so be it.