re: Will Muschamp was head coach in waiting at Texas. Would he have done well as UT HC?

You think Pruitt is worse than Muschamp? I think you have that backwards

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Tanner whiffed on options A (Herman), and B (Smart), and didn't have the stones to pull the trigger on Lincoln Riley. Only other major candidate was Willie Taggart, and even though he's repairing a broken FSU program, I don't think he'd be a good fit here.

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That’s sorta a strange way of putting things.

Herman was a done deal if we were willing to give him an out clause, without a buyout, if Texas came calling. The proverbial straw happened when we lost to The Citadel and Herman called Tanner and said he was no longer interested, immediately after the game. I know that for a fact.

Smart wanted the UGA job and we had no chance at him unless we had gone after him at the end of 2013, which we didn’t.

Lincoln Riley was basically the coach in waiting at Oklahoma. There was no chance there. Stoops let it be known that he was close to retiring and rumor has it that he had even flown to Columbia to speak with Spurrier a year prior about them both getting near the end of their coaching careers.

Willie Taggart got an interview strictly as part of an EO initiative. He wasn’t qualified and he would have been a terrible fit. Word is he also did not interview well. We dodged a bullet there.

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Tanner needed to feel comfy with the coach's ties to the SEC, and muschamp checked the boxes. Tanner settled for who would take the job. Tennessee did the same thing, albeit significantly worse, when they had their abortion of a search two years later.

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Tanner didn’t settle for anything. I agree, at the time, I thought it was a bad hire but Tanner didn’t settle .... and everyone knows I am no fan of Ray’s as an AD. But Ray met with mUSChamp and he genuinely liked him. People forget that SPURrier and Tanner had reached out to Boom for the DC job when he was fired at Florida. mUSChamp had taken his family and gone to the islands and he had received over a dozen calls from coaches all over the country wanting him as a DC. In the end he chose Auburn because of ties there and that soured him, in the eyes of a lot of us.

Fast forward a year and Elliott finishes the season in a shite show, Herman bails after the Citadel loss, Smart is already doing a deal with UGA, and HR is telling Tanner he has to interview Taggart who had reached out for an interview. Riley got his salary doubled to stay with Oklahoma until Stoops retired.

There were two other candidates that were going to be interviewed but Tanner decided to talk to mUSChamp one more time. He made the call and they decided to meet face to face. The rest is history but one of the things Tanner said to some people was that he connected with mUSChamp in terms of drive and competitiveness and he appreciated that out of mUSChamp.

Also, the deciding factor was, of course, that you can’t spell mUSChamp without USChamp.

:wink: