I was thinking about how Chad Morris could possibly save his job at this point. I think we'd need to beat WKU and two SEC games for anyone to have any faith restored in him. That's the thing. It's not really the low win amount, it's the fact that things will clearly not improve by any significant degree under this guy. Most people were willing to accept missing a bowl as long as he won the gimmes and took down a league opponent. That would be SOME improvement. It would be at least displaying a modicum of competency that could be build upon. It's looking like he can't even meet the haughty bar of five wins in year two.

The whole "five year rebuild" thing that's been made a meme is going to apply to the next guy without a shred of irony. We're low, guys. We're Kansas and Vanderbilt low. The chances of hiring someone who comes in and has immediate amazing results like Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss after their 2–10 season is not likely. We're going to have to put up with a slow rebuild from the next person.

Clark has done nothing but succeed. He's 106–11 as a high school coach. Then he moved to the coordinator position in the collegiate ranks and did well enough to get a head coach position at FCS school Jacksonville State. He went 11–4 and took them to the playoffs his first year. The year before that they went 6–5 and lost to our 2012 squad. Then he got a G5 job at UAB and went bowl eligible 6–6 his first year in 2014. They hadn't been bowl eligible since 2004. They shut the program back and he comes back three years later and immediately takes them to 8–5, 11–3 (giving them a brief ranking for the first time in program history), and now they're 5–1.

He's done this so methodically that he's gone completely unnoticed. He ground away in the HS ranks, stomped the competition, and took a humble promotion. Then did so again. And again. Jacksonville State and UAB are storied losers, but he overcame it by knowing how to coach football.

He's been in Alabama his entire life, so I know we'd lose those vaunted Texas recruiting benefits, but so fricking what. It's not helped us. Keeping our good recruits in-state and then cherry picking what we can from the bordering states seems doable with anyone whose competent and hard-working enough. Texas is a huge state, but all they're really good for with their 7-on-7 is skill positions, it seems. We can get a decent QB, WR, and RB from Texas every year without much trouble. Get some high 3* OL and DL from Louisiana, maybe even utilize his Alabama connections to get some of the players that Alabama and Auburn have overlooked. Philon would be a prime example of this. Combine all this with a handful of 4* from Arkansas, and I don't see why we couldn't return to at least being somewhat competitive.

I really can't think of another actually attainable coach that would inspire excitement from me after Morris is fired. Everyone else has weird baggage, succeeds in the lower ranks on a gimmicky offense, is too old and has failed somewhere else, or is just as big of a risk as Chad Morris was. I don't think we're going to poach another high profile coach during our next search. It really pisses me off how the UofA wasn't just a little bit smarter during the last search. There were good names out there that made more sense than Chad Morris and his shitty, losing record at SMU.

The point is, Bill Clark has done what he's done slowly, but with tangible, consistent, and linear progress. And from complete scratch every time. That seems exactly like what we need, and it's probably the best we can hope for anyway, given our mismanagement of the football program since 2012.