re: Apparently Tray Scott is leaving for Georgia

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SECs Arkansas st??? Are you kidding me. Hugh Freeze last season had the 10th highest salary in all of college football! People arent hopping to pay cuts. Freeze isn't some anomaly that couldn't be reproduced. OM is a national brand now.

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Yeah, so, that was kinda my point. We're a national brand in part because our head coach has his dream job, recruits better than anyone else has in Oxford, and has shown the world he can beat Nick Saban. Ole Miss means more to Freeze than other programs would, and likewise local guys typically mean more to us (though I don't agree with that; just get the best guy for the job imo). To think there aren't greener pastures than Ole Miss in the world of college football is just silly, and Freeze's salary is that high in part because every SEC coach's salary is and also in part because we showed the rest of the conference that we'll pay that much to keep him. If we were to fire Freeze and hire someone along the lines of Chip Kelly, what's to stop us from turning into a stepping stone program à la Arkansas State (or Memphis these days for that matter).

I love Ole Miss, but it's objectively in the bottom half of conference jobs. Without Freeze, the guy who's been bringing in the 'croots that get us national attention and the guy who's been beating Bama to put us in the forefront of the college football world, what's to say we'd still be a national brand? Not to mention, Freeze's successes in recruiting and against Bama have definitely been anomalies for us. He's the best recruiter in program history, and he's won more against Bama than any other coach not to have a Manning on the team. We've only beaten Bama 10 times on the field, and Freeze accounts for a whopping 20% of those. And re: Shea, would you rather he look like a deer in the headlights to open conference play next season, or would you rather him get live game reps potentially to salvage a season we didn't know couldn't be salvaged at the time? Going into last season, most of us were bitching that Shea was getting shirted in the first place because no one expected him to stick around 4+ years.

We absolutely had to fire our DC after the past two seasons, and we hired an OC who hopefully won't replace our best player on the field with a beefier QB who probably won't punch it in, but could. Grant Heard was a very solid recruiter, but our WR coaching hasn't been spectacular. Our guys have been super talented, but don't you think there's a reason the Vikings kept saying Laquon needs to work on some things before he can see more playing time? Donte also had to work on his route-running substantially once he made it, and Van Jefferson's dad, an NFL coach, was wary about his son committing to us because of how poorly he perceived our WR coaching to be. I loved Kiffin, but he's had plenty of rumors about him re: our NCAA situation, and our DL flat out quit on him last year, so I'm not sure how that's an insurmountable loss either, especially if keeping him on staff would've only drawn more ire from the NCAA.

Things are at the lowest they've been in the Freeze era, but what makes anyone think we'd be able to convince someone better to take over a program that's apparently such a shitshow? If the NCAA repercussions feature a bowl ban, we're spoiled goods for however many seasons end in November anyway, and we actually don't have the bottomless resources of Bama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia, aTm, Texas, USC, UCLA, Michigan, tOSU, FSU, etc. I know we were awesome and went to two consecutive NY6 games (thanks Freeze!), but we're just not on that tier, and likely won't ever be unless we win a title. Them's the breaks. We haven't been a true national title contender since the fathers of I'm sure most of the posters here were pre-pubescent (if even alive). We've had some great years by our standards thanks in large part to Freeze, and I'm wholly unconvinced that the departure of an unproven DL coach who was here less than 2 months should be the final straw. It can get worse. We've experienced worse in the last decade. Don't make it worse for no reason

Sorry to add to the novella, but

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what makes you think that?

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I know players on the team, and I knew players there during Nutt's downfall. By all accounts there's no comparison between how disengaged the team was halfway through Nutt Year 3 and Freeze currently. I agree that it was scary to see how disengaged we were for the Egg Bowl, but it's still leaps and bounds better than 2010-2011 in damn near every aspect, including cheating (frick David Saunders)