What went Wrong Houston Nutt? good read!

[swamprooter]

by Ole Miss Sports News on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 2:42pm
by Dave Childers

There has been an abundance of writing about Houston Nutt’s downward spiral over the last two years and repeated references to 12 consecutive SEC losses and mention made about numerous “worst” and “first” situations, such as worst loss in 25 years or first time losing to a team since 1946.

While those situations are frequently cited to show just how bad things are within the Ole Miss football program, what has barely been scratched on the surface is that universal question – “why?”

The frequent arguments center around the coaching or talent with some fans believing Ole Miss has the talent to win with others placing blame on coaches for poor efforts and preparation.

After covering Ole Miss during Nutt’s two years at Ole Miss and observing from a distance for the last year and half, I have some thoughts on why the Rebel football program has sunk to depths not seen in the last 75 years, if not within its nearly five score history.

Let’s look at some of the Nutt nuisances that led to the downfall.

Paranoia: Nutt hadn’t coached his first game at Ole Miss before I was accosted in the Indoor Practice Facility and my loyalty questioned after I had written that Mississippi State appeared to be outworking Ole Miss in recruiting (State was ranked fourth nationally at the time in recruiting and Ole Miss had hardly made a dent in the rankings with virtually no commitments). “I don’t know if I can trust you,” Nutt said after being told about what I had written. When Nutt made that comment, he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking away like someone could have been sneaking up behind him. Chris Vaughn, his recruiting coordinator, later explained that Nutt “had been burned at Arkansas and didn’t trust the media.” Vaughn said that Nutt was close with the media at Arkansas at one point, but he felt even those who he had befriended had turned on him amid the text scandal, the loss the Springdale players and repeated underachieving with Darren McFadden and Felix Jones in the backfield. Nutt later apologized to me for that particular incident and it was written off as a misunderstanding.

What I quickly learned about Houston Nutt was that he didn’t like confrontation and when confronted, any situation would end with a whimper. He wanted problems and issues to go away without having to address them, something I’m sure is engrained in his personality and carries over to situations with his players and assistants. However, Nutt continued to be told of writings by someone in his enter circle and would occasionally challenge me, and I assume other reporters, without having personally read the article – and told of selective portions that did not present the full context of the article. On one occasion, I pulled out my iPhone and showed him what I had written and he commented, “there’s nothing wrong with that.” Nutt emphasized that he didn’t read the internet; however, he evidently had his insiders keep a very watchful eye for anything negative that was written about his team – paranoia at its best. Despite his well founded paranoia, when confronted he would normally back down – not necessarily the best of characteristics for a head football coach.

I would also credit that paranoia as resulting in his decision to not hire two holdovers from the previous staff, Hugh Freeze and Tony Hughes, both who had established deep ties at Ole Miss and both with young families that wanted to stay in Oxford after Ed Orgeron was fired. Hughes had a son on the football team and both coaches continued to recruit for Nutt with hopes of being part of his new staff. Nutt rejected both, which cost Ole Miss several recruits, including five-star wide receiver DeAndre Brown and four-star cornerback Charles Mitchell and likely impacted recruiting for at least the next signing class as well if not the 2010 class as well. Hughes and Freeze were clearly the top recruiters on Orgeron's staff and if you look at the talent depleted roster three years later, look no farther than Nutt’s paranoia about retaining "loyal coaches" that he could trust over capable coaches and its adverse impact on recruiting.

Arrogance: Hand in glove with paranoia is Houston Nutt’s arrogance. Nutt felt Arkansas high school players would gravitate to Ole Miss, that he would get the best players in the state of Mississippi with little recruiting effort, much the way he had frequently done in Arkansas where kids grow up to be Razorback fans, and he also felt he had assembled an experienced and loyal staff - with the nucleus coming with him from Arkansas - that would continue to win as it often had while he was the head coach at Arkansas. All of those things proved wrong. Prospects in Arkansas did generally like Nutt, but they had a higher calling and that was to play for the Razorbacks, if offered. Other than one offensive lineman, Nutt was unable to flip any Arkansas recruits on his commitment list at the time he left to take over at Ole Miss and the battles he was in on resulted in players generally picking the Razorbacks over Ole Miss. Moreover, he appeared to avoid head to head recruiting battles with Arkansas during his tenure, and if he did engage those battles, he wasn’t successful.

Nutt also quickly learned that recruiting in Mississippi was tough. Despite the proximity of Arkansas to Mississippi, Nutt rarely recruited the Magnolia State while he was at Arkansas and he had virtually no connections when he took over the Ole Miss program. He also found that he was not only up against Mississippi State and Southern Miss, but virtually every other program in the SEC – and other major schools from other conferences were not intimidated with Ole Miss when it came to recruiting. Alabama, Georgia, Auburn, and LSU particularly cherry-picked the state with great success and recruiting junior college prospects was equally as challenging. In-state, he under estimated Mississippi State’s then new head coach, Dan Mullen, and his ability to attract major prospects. Nutt won a fair share of the prospects in 2009 and 2010, but lost out on several he coveted and dearly needed in his first three years until he bested Mullen outright for the 2011 class. Nonetheless, those misses in 2009 and 2010 are key to the depleted talent situation Ole Miss now faces.

After Nutt went 9-4 in 2008 and was headed into the 2009 season with a top 10 ranking, I wrote an article called “trap games” – games where Ole Miss would be favored, but should be on alert for a possible upset. Two of the four games I picked were South Carolina and Mississippi State. That writing was discussed with several coaches while I was attending Fantasy Camp in the summer of 2009. When it came to the subject of Mississippi State, several coaches laughed and one said, “this is not our first rodeo, we’ve never lost to Mississippi State in anything.” It was the second time I’d heard the “never lost to Mississippi State,” saying, the first time being when I was accosted by Nutt a year before over my writing about State outworking Ole Miss in recruiting. Nutt crowed that he would never lose to Mississippi State - in anything. Nutt drove that point home and his staff did the same thing. I made a point to tell the assistants one thing that day – “you may have coached in Starkville before, but you’ve never coached in Starkville with Ole Miss on your shirt, there will be a difference.” After Ole Miss was routed in that game in late November 2009, I called Chris Vaughn and wanted his take on his State experience. He admitted it had been different than the staff expected and they didn’t have the team up, but they now knew what to expect. A year later, they lost again to State, this time at home. By that time, the arrogance on the staff was gone, but it had done its damage and if there is a red letter date in the demise of Houston Nutt and his program, it is November 28, 2009 when he lost 41-27 in Starkville, with Dan Mullen directing his Bulldogs to take a knee at the end of the game deep in Ole Miss territory. Just as Nutt and staff were arrogant about Mississippi State, their arrogance about recruiting was largely responsible for pummeling the program to depths of despair not seen for decades. Not only did they not get the Michael Dyers (five-star running back now at Auburn) from Arkansas, they didn’t get much of anyone else from Arkansas with only roughly four key players from that state now on the roster.

The Arkansas Mafia: The day Houston Nutt was rumored to take over the Ole Miss program; I went to the Arkansas official web site and mused over Nutt’s staff. Frankly, it was impressive. Tracy Rocker, who Ole Miss sorely missed after he moved to Auburn after one year in Oxford, was coaching the defensive line, James Shibest, Mike Markuson, and Chris Vaughn had been with Nutt almost exclusively during his time at Arkansas, now totally nearly a decade. Nutt’s two first assistant coaching hires were Ron Dickerson, Jr. and Kim Dameron both at ULM. Dameron had been with Nutt in previous stints, serving as defensive coordinator at one point, and Dickerson was the son of Dickerson, Sr., a longtime assistant at Penn State. Not surprisingly, those would be the first two to be fired as scapegoats for the 2010 season. Nutt also brought in Tyrone Nix from South Carolina and his brother, Derrick, who was on the Atlanta Falcons staff. Rounding out the group was Kent Austin, the former Ole Miss quarterback who had won the Grey Cup in the CFL both as a head coach and player. On the surface, it was an impressive staff – but there were issues. Neither Dameron nor Dickerson were particularly good recruiters and Dameron made no headway in his territory, Louisiana, where Ole Miss had great success in the Orgeron years with Orgeron being from that state and legendary high school coach Frank Wilson also making an impact in his old stomping ground. Ole Miss had started losing recruits from the gulf coast in the 1980s and Dickerson wasn’t able to turn that around. Rocker was gone after one year, replaced by former Auburn and Ole Miss defensive line coach Terry Price, who was not a successful recruiter and also had difficulty in getting results from a particularly talented defensive line, especially in the 2010 season. Tyrone Nix had been cut loose – or was going to be fired – by Steve Spurrier at South Carolina and Nutt’s hiring of him after Nutt’s offense torched Nix’s defense in 2007 for more than 600 yards was puzzling. Vaughn wore the title of recruiting coordinator and cornerbacks coach with Dameron coaching safeties. Vaughn was a relentless recruiter – but his talent evaluation has to be suspect – and Nutt had moved him around several times at Arkansas and even removed him from the field one year – leaving the feeling that he was pretty much being hidden on the staff when it came to coaching abilities. Austin struggled to transition to the college game. He worked hard at recruiting, but didn’t know how to close and generally failed to recognize the cut-throat nature of recruiting. The remaining Arkansas mafia – Markuson, Shibest and a host of support personnel such as Clifton Ealy, Danny Nutt, and strength and conditioning coach Don Decker seemed to be along for the ride. The Dave Radar as offensive coordinator experiment was a disaster as has been the David Lee move. Gunter Brewer, who gave up a job with Oklahoma State to get back to Oxford after his mother passed away, was never in the inner circle and had a minimal impact. Overall, the staff is mostly a group of Nutt insiders that he can trust and are intent on doing the things they had success with ten years ago while other teams have shown innovation and introduced change. The result, when you factor in undisciplined players, is the stumbling and bumbling offense that has been the signature of Ole Miss football this season and last and a defense that is anything but defensive. Throw in the paranoia and arrogance, and it just added to the recipe for disaster.

Discipline: Perhaps the most difficult situation to explain and understand is discipline. Ole Miss' problems are many on and off the field. It can be seen in early timeouts, unnecessary personal fouls and an overall high number of penalties every game, failure to maintain gap responsibility on defense as well as off field and academic issues. How much is related to intelligence, or lack there of? How much to character issues? Does the team have a drug problem? How much can be attributed to inequitable or an overall lack of disciplinary measures meted out by the coaches? While the cause may be hard to define or pinpoint, one fact cannot be disputed and that is that Nutt lost this team - and that happened a long, long time ago. Clearly, the inmates are running the prison.

While I was excited about Nutt taking over at Ole Miss two things stood out in my mind from watching him coach at Arkansas. First were his inconsistent teams. I watched his Arkansas team with McFadden and Jones in the backfield lose to Tennessee 34-13 in 2007 only to upset eventual national champion LSU 13 days later. That led me to feel Nutt would lose some games he shouldn’t and win some he shouldn’t – that proved to be eerily true; it’s just that there were far more losses than I ever could imagine. The second red flag was discipline issues at Arkansas. There appeared to be far more than normal and Nutt appeared far too forgiving. I was told he genuinely cared for his players and loved to give them second and third chances to a fault. That seemed to carry over to Ole Miss, but perhaps a bigger issue was signing players that should have been screened a lot better. Orgeron once told me that his assistants would go in to a school and never talk to a prospect – before they did – they would talk to the principal, teachers, counselors and even classmates to gauge the character of a prospect. They’d take that further and talk with clergy, friends of the family and anyone who could vouch for character or a lack thereof of the prospect. While Orgeron liked to go for kids that just needed an opportunity (see Dexter McCluster), Nutt appeared to like to go after kids with character issues with hopes of setting them straight. It was a huge mistake and is the reason for high attrition in all of his classes as well as ongoing discipline problems on the team.

Self discipline is often described as doing the right thing when no one is looking. There's apparently not a lot of that going on by many on football scholarship at Ole Miss. That's not to say that the team is full of players with character issues. It does speak of there being several "rotten apples" who are on the verge of ruining the entire barrel. For whatever reason, recruiting those few bad apples, or lax discipline, has impacted the entire team and resulted in Nutt totally losing control.

Recruiting: Nutt’s recruiting, or the lack thereof, is probably deserving of its own book – but certainly not deserving of the “Meat Market” title that was written during the Orgeron era. Despite all the previous discussion pertaining to Nutt’s shortfalls, recruiting stands out most. Ole Miss fans, even the most vocal Ed Orgeron critics acknowledge he was an outstanding recruiter. Some will point out that he only had one good class – the 2006 signing class – and the other two were weak. There is merit to that; however, when Orgeron took over, David Cutcliffe had only eight commitments and Orgeron was limited to recruiting, for the most part, to only a few days in January before signing day in 2005. That time also limited his ability to do the character checks that he felt were an important part of recruiting and resulted in higher attrition than he would have liked. In 2007, he was working as a coach already on the hot seat without a contract extension and Pete Boone refused to allow him to oversign – he ended up signing only 21 prospects that year – which in the interest of full disclosure may have hurt Nutt’s effort on the field in 2010. Orgeron was further strap hung by Boone and staff by failing to give him consent to sign some players with academic or behavioral question marks as well as a limited recruiting budget. Orgeron told me a few days after he was fired that if any coach was going to have success at Ole Miss; the recruiting restrictions had to be lifted.

By all accounts, those restrictions were not imposed – or at least not adhered to for the most part – by Houston Nutt with his experience and ability to circumvent Boone, either by working with boosters or ensuring some of Boone’s questionable antics were leaked to the media. Even without restrictions, Nutt didn’t take advantage of it. In the last ten years, recruiting has substantially changed – it has gone from a rush after the season to sign the best players to a year round job. One example exemplifies this. In 2009, two weeks before national signing day, word leaked that Nutt was in on a big time receiver out of Memphis, Marlon Brown. Brown was four-star prospect that most experts felt was headed for Georgia, where Mark Richt had been recruiting him at Bulldog camps since Brown’s freshman year in high school. Ole Miss, for whatever reason, never recruited Brown – outside of perhaps sending a standard offer letter – that up until just before signing day. Nutt went after Brown’s mother and almost sealed the deal, but came up short with Brown’s loyalty to Georgia for recruiting him so long being the deciding factor. That example shows that not only that recruiting is a year round process – but also one that often starts many years before a prospect enters his senior year. That process appeared to escape Nutt, who was generally in the background at most camps, often was late in offering prospects, and was not keen on early commitments until his second or third year at Ole Miss. To his credit, Nutt appeared to close strong – at least in the recruiting rankings, in both 2008 and 2009. In 2009, I received a text from him on national signing day – he wanted to know if Ole Miss had passed Arkansas in the recruiting rankings – which tends to show how misdirected and obsessed he was.

Factor in the failure to retain Hughes and Freeze and yet another thing that impacted Nutt’s recruiting was his failure to work the many recruits Orgeron already had committed, which totaled somewhere around 20. In early December, while Nutt was sitting alone in Oxford, there was no recruiting being done. Note that’s a period of high school playoffs, all-star games, and junior college championship games and Nutt was not only essentially sitting in Oxford alone while his staff was prepping Arkansas for the Cotton Bowl – there were no calls being made to any recruits including those committed to Ole Miss. I called numerous recruits in December that year and a familiar refrain was they hadn’t heard from Nutt and didn’t know if they had an offer with the new staff or not. Those included the likes of Brandon Bolden, who was a Louisiana running back on Alabama's radar screen and one that Orgeron had brought to camp the previous summer and extended an offer. Interestingly, Bolden was about to be dropped by Nutt when his staff did begin recruiting in January and one coach called me and asked me what I thought of Bolden – the coach said they were concerned because Bolden ran a 4.72 40 yard dash earlier that year at a Nike Camp. I pointed out that it was on a muddy track and it was the fastest time at the camp. After receiving that information, the staff continued to recruit Bolden, brought him in for a visit and received a commitment in late January. However, Bolden was one of a very few who was either committed to Ole Miss or high on Orgeron's hot board that Nutt continued to recruit and sign. I once did a story that is now somewhere in the bowels of Rivals servers breaking down what happened to Orgeron recruits. I can’t recall the details – several from South Panola signed with Southern Miss and had trouble qualifying and didn’t play college football anywhere. I’m sure there are others that did have successful college careers, and certainly some would have fared better than 15 or so names that Nutt signed in 2008 that are not on the roster today.

If there were problems in recruiting, perhaps none were more noticeable than the process. I can only compare how Ed Orgeron operated. He often said recruiting was a 24/7 job, 365 days a year and he lived by that creed. Even after a big loss, the first topic at the next day’s meeting was to have assistant coaches go over which recruits they had called and give an update. Recruiting was highly organized with war rooms done daily, even if coaches were on the road. Recruiting went on even as coaches were preparing their weekly game plans and having practice. The difference in Orgeron and his confidence when it came to recruiting versus running the rest of the program was night and day. He subscribed to the recruiting services, viewed film, read what recruits were saying and wasn’t intimidated by any school. He often quiped to recruits that telling him no was not an option. Calling him a relentless recruiter doesn't do justice. When he failed on the field in his first season at Ole Miss and the excitement a new head coach brings was gone, he turned to what he does best - recruit. He re-engerized the Ole Miss fan base with a recruiting class that was perhaps the best at Ole Miss in two generations with at least half a dozen landing in the NFL. He made recruiting fun for all the coaches. Every coach had to agree to an offer after watching film before a prospect was extended the offer. Verbal commitments were orchestrated and taken when the entire staff was present where every coach could congratulate the prospect. Every coach was expected to recruit and recruit hard. Hugh Freeze was Orgeron’s recruiting coordinator the last two seasons and Freeze, an exceptional organizer, knew where every coach was, who he was recruiting and every detail that Orgeron frequently demanded.

Contrast Orgeron’s recruiting to Nutt’s and there is a striking difference. It can best be described as a de-centralized approach with each coach doing his own thing. Markuson went to wherever in search of offensive linemen and Tyrone Nix and Price recruited Georgia without a lot of success. Vaughn, originally from Tallahassee, recruited Florida looking mainly for speed players. Derrick Nix recruited Memphis without much success while Dickerson was doing the same thing with the same results on the gulf coast. To say recruiting was laid back would be an understatement. One Nutt assistant who recruited the state of Georgia told me he’d let Georgia, Georgia Tech and Auburn get the recruits they wanted, then he’d go in and see what was left over and might get a couple. I didn’t know if he was joking and I expected a smile or laugh – I didn’t get one.

Once the Ole Miss Spirit broke a commitment and I called Vaughn to complain that we at Rivals were not notified. He didn’t even know about the commitment and called back later to explain that a certain coach had let the Spirit know directly. My concern over that situation was not as much about not being notified as it was the manner in which recruiting was being done with one hand not knowing what the other was doing.

I believe that while Nutt didn’t change his method of recruiting, he finally got the message about how recruiting had changed after the 4-8 season. He and his staff appeared to work harder than ever before for the 2011 signing class and the results showed. It’s just unfortunate for both Nutt and his staff and Ole Miss that it was too little too late.

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Like most Ole Miss fans, I was excited when Ole Miss hired Houston Nutt. Unlike many Ole Miss fans, I hated to see Ed Orgeron go. I’m proud to call him a friend and if ever a college coach got a raw deal, Ed did thanks to a bunch of second-rate journalists who had it in for him. He developed more of a love for Ole Miss in his three years than Houston Nutt would have if he had coached there for 25 years. Ed should feel vindicated for his recruits were largely responsible for Ole Miss best years in 50 years – as Nutt was fond of saying. Somewhere in sunny California, Ed is having the last laugh. I do feel he was a year away and will always be left to wonder – perhaps he wouldn’t have won the Cotton Bowl after the 2008 season, but I feel he would have continued to attract talent and could have eventually gotten to that level or beyond.

While I’ll never call Houston Nutt a friend – that is limited to a very select few due to his paranoia – I do feel that he is, for the most part, a good person. I think he was burned out at Arkansas and the re-generation at Ole Miss essentially flamed out after two years. Even when he was winning on the field, he wasn’t winning at recruiting and that was key to his downfall. I think the biggest disappointment I have in Nutt was I felt with his experience and reputation, he could successfully recruit and that he’d have Ole Miss competitive for every game. Instead, he leaves the program far worse than any coach has left the program in the modern era, including the Billy Brewer probation ravaged program of 1994.

Perhaps far worse than were Nutt has left the program, he has done his share in dividing the Ole Miss fan base to a point that borders on the conduct and attitude of spoiled children. If the comments directed toward the current Ole Miss coaching candidates are any indication, the new coach will be on the hot seat the day he takes over the position – a truly sad situation - and as a Rebel fan - one that I hope can be changed very soon.

Dave Childers covered Ole Miss for almost 15 years as an internet publisher, including almost 10 years as Ole Miss’ publisher on Rivals.com. He is retired from sports writing and spends time in Mississippi, Georgia and Virginia. He holds a MA in Journalism from Ole Miss.
The Great Creations of the Human Race are the Concepts of Duty, Honor, Loyalty and Freedom!

[webbmaster]

[Insert drivel here]

[Woodduckdawg]

I just want him to lose one more