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James Franklin got fired for no real publicly discernible reason. I don't know who the frick Penn State thinks they are these days, but they can sit their asses down with us and Nebraska and do some reflecting. His results were on par with Joe Paterno. The guy who won their last NC 40 years ago and hadn't won the NC in 25 years before he retired and croaked.

Personally, I don't care if a hire is a splash. Wins are more exciting than a good press conference.

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I'd rather spend money on NIL than a meh hire

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Honestly, I respect this answer. It's better than the "wHo We GeT?!" bullshite. The only reason I'm not in the same boat is because we have an administration I don't believe is capable of going whole hog all-in on this and not fricking it to oblivion and back.

I don't agree with the "meh" part. If you think it's meh, that's only because it doesn't excite you. That "meh" hire is currently 6–3 at a P4 program, just upset #10 Miami, went 11–3 and to the playoffs last year, and 11–3 the year before that. That's just objectively not "meh." Does it mean he'll succeed here? No. That's just how it goes. But thanks for having a real opinion at least, it's really a good idea in theory. Especially considering Bobby's achilles heel was his recruiting. Well, that and his offenses being so good that he couldn't keep his defense off the field.

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Come on. Go on the record with who you think should be our next coach.

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Rhett Lashlee
Jon Sumrall
Jamey Chadwell

In that order, but Chadwell is a distant third.

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To insinuate that Morris was somehow a celebrated hire in 2018 is laughable. He was not "the next big thing". Norvell would have done a fine job (at least better than the last 7 years) and Silverfield would do a fine job as well in this cycle.

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I think it's fair to say he was while he was orchestrating the offensive rise at Clemson. But then Clemson takes the next step and wins two natties after he leaves, and SMU exposes him as an also-ran.

So naturally we hire him to predictable results.

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would you rather stick with BP knowing what you’re getting to an extent or go with a high-risk, high-reward option

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Neither. Bob Chesney is high risk/unknown reward because he's doing well at JMU, but he's maintaining what Curt Cignetti built. I'd say high risk/high reward would be Jamey Chadwell. He built Coastal Carolina, went 13–1 at Liberty, and he's declined the past two years. Maybe Liberty isn't the place for him, or maybe he'd be our Mike Norvell. Sam Pittman was high risk/low reward. Chad Morris was high risk/low reward. We need to stop making these hires and just hire people who're winning somewhere - and then avoid ungodly buyouts and extensions for barely winning seasons, and cut them loose when it's appropriate to do so.

I'd seriously rather have Rhett Lashlee than Bobby Petrino. Yeah, he's 5–3 at SMU this year. But SMU isn't exactly an easy place to win at these days, they're a team with G5 resources that joined a P4 conference only last year. He went 11–3 the previous two years and 7–6 his first year. I know this year is a disappointment for them because he just went to the playoffs, but he's honestly killing it at SMU. He's having more success than Sonny Dykes did at SMU, and TCU hired Dykes and went to the National Championship. Lashlee is as low risk as we can reasonably expect, and a high reward.

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BP is going to be one of the top options. There are too many openings to compete with and they aren't going to lay all of this team's shortcomings at his feet.

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It's almost like we should have fired Pitman last year (which was already too late) when there was less competition. This athletic department is a kangaroo court. It's humiliating on every level.

How did you not fricking know the answer wasn't Bobby? His record as an HC speaks for itself. Like, I don't know what to tell you people who jump through all these hoops to justify his sucking and mediocrity since we fired him.

His last year at Louisville was 2–10, and he never got above nine wins in the ACC. Then he went 5–6, 8–4, and 5–6 at an FCS team where it should have been a coup to have hired a coach like that. Now he's 0–3 again here, all close losses (though this one was nine points, just outside of one score). 17 years of being HC, and he's gotten 10/11 wins four times. The rest, 8/9 wins and then fell off a cliff his last year at Louisville.

We caught him at just the right time. The right time in his life, the right level of in-state production to offset his underwhelming recruiting. The time has passed. Move on from Bobby Petrino, people. This is like when UNC rehired Mack Brown, or when Randy Edsall went back to UConn. He was the right guy at one time. He's not anymore.

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This Aggie team seems to be average

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Aggie seems to be ranked #3 in the nation.

I don't think he's able to get to 9 wins anymore, that's really all I'm trying to say. Maybe once in a great while, but with the change of conference schedule, we should average 7/8 wins a year, but every four or five years we should be able to punch through to a legitimately good season. And honestly, if we'd start using the fricking portal and NIL wisely, the sky could be the limit for us.

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Maybe, but other SEC teams are showing they don't believe that.

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Five of the top 20 you listed are committed to other SEC schools, and two of them are committed to Missouri. Don't you think it's a problem when some of the top 20 players in our state are committed to G5s like Georgia State, Charlotte, and Appalachian State? One of them is committed to UCA, for frick's sake. Yeah, UCA is in-state, but that's an FCS team. If you expand it to the top 25 players in-state on 24/7's ranking, we have two players committed to Arkansas State, two committed to Charlotte, one committed to North Texas, one committed to Appalachian State, and one committed to FCS. Two are still undecided. That's atrocious, man.

We have five players who are 4* this year. The highest ranked one is 92. Most of them are just barely scraping the 4* basement. Our #25 player is ranked 80, which is the lowest you can be without being 2*. We quite frequently produce the lowest number of 4* and 5* players in any of the 12 SEC states, and it's usually the lowest by a country mile. The upside is we're the only one besides Missouri and Louisiana who don't have another P4 team in-state to split the pot with.


Texas:
5*: 3
4*: 40
Highest rated player: 98 (3)
Rating of #25 player: 91

Florida:
5*: 5
4*: 33
Highest rated player: 98 (5)
Rating of #25 player: 91

Georgia:
5*: 6
4*: 27
Highest rated player: 98 (6)
Rating of #25 player: 90


Alabama:
5*: 1
4*: 14
Highest rated player: 98
Rating of #25 player: 88

Mississippi:
5*: 2
4*: 10
Highest rated player: 98 (2)
Rating of #25 player: 87

Lousiana:
5*: 1
4*: 9
Highest rated player: 98
Rating of #25 player: 87

Tennessee:
5*: 2
4*: 6
Highest rated player: 98 (2)
Rating of #25 player: 87


Kentucky:
5*: 0
4*: 8
Highest rated player: 93 (2)
Rating of #25 player: 83

South Carolina:
5*: 0
4*: 5
Highest rated player: 93
Rating of #25 player: 86

Arkansas:
5*: 0
4*: 5
Highest rated player: 92
Rating of #25 player: 80


Oklahoma:
5*: 0
4*: 4
Highest rated player: 91
Rating of #25 player: 86


Missouri:
5*: 1
4*: 1
Highest rated player: 98
Rating of #25 player: 85

Even though there are actually a couple of states worse off than us at the top end, look at the numbers for the #25 in every class. We're one of only two states below 85 for the 25th best player in the state, and we're handily the lowest. We have a handful of players who are SEC caliber. Then we have the rest of our top ten who are P4 caliber. Then we don't really have jack shite.

And that's just this year. I had to go all the way back to 2016 to see when Arkansas produced its last 5* player. And that 2016 class was one 5* and two 4*, lol. #25 was 80 again. Before that was 2010.

Locking down all our good players is a start, but the "We GoTtA rEcRuIt TeXaS" people aren't really wrong. Texas could sign an entire class of 4* and have some to spare, plus some 5*. I think Arkansas fans got a little bit robbed. Our high school football is dismal, but the NIL and transfer portal should have been godsends for us. Instead, we have some puritanical jackasses who're slow on the uptake making the calls, and now we've fallen behind because of our lack of going all-in. And we're just making miss after miss in the portal, paying players like Taylen Green well into six figures and eating up what little budget we have.

We're ranked #65 in recruiting at the moment, and that's unacceptable even by our apparently new standards.

Petrino, for all his coaching prowess, was kind of a shite-arse recruiter. The NIL era should play to his strengths a lot more, but I also consider that the numbers from 2013 onward show us that he's not the same Bobby Petrino that he was here and during his first Louisville stint.

He's been a head coach for 17 seasons. Of those 17, he's broken ten wins four times. Almost every other year has been 8/9 wins. He went 2–10 his last year at Lousville, then 5–5, 8–4, and 5–6 at an FCS team, for Christ's sake. We need to be realistic with what we're looking at, here. I do believe he liked Arkansas more than the rest of those teams - yes, even Louisville. And I think he'll give 110% here again. But I think 2012 was going to be an 8/9 win season, and I don't think he has it in him to do better than that. And after Missouri state, I'm not sure he can even achieve that consistently.

I say this because I know we're just going to hire him at the end of the year because it's the easiest, laziest thing this administration can do, and they'll make a bunch of excuses for why he didn't do any better than Sam was when he took over, yadda yadda. I'm keeping an open mind, but a spade is a spade.