Without Sylvester Croom

Lou Holtz made the good point (I couldn't believe it either) that there aren't enough black coaches going the Turner Gill route, which is to be the head coach at a smaller school and work your way up to a job in one of the major conferences. Instead, there are a lot of guys that have been high-level assistants at big school but have no head coaching experience, which can hurt them when they're competing for a job with a candidate that has been a head coach for a number of years.

And though I'm an Ole Miss alum, I'm a big Croom fan and was hoping he would make it work in Starkville.

 

Thought the guy did a more-than-respectable job, in brutal competitive circumstances. You'd have to be the town drunk to expect much better than the occasional 7-5, there. You're going to outrecruit . . . WHO?

 

Mississippi Valley State?

 

Three out of 119 is inexcusable, as is the racist cliche that great young, black coaches are "recruiters" who don't know Xs and Os. More of those guys need coordinator's positions, which is the best way to get more of them head coaching gigs. I agree with Dungy on that one.

 

This has been asked and answered. Last year was a fluke. The sample size of his games at Starkville was sufficient to see that he was never going to get the offense straightened out.

I wasn't in the room, of course, but I imagine the conversation with Croom and his AD was just like the one between the Ole Miss AD and Cutcliffe, less than a year removed from winning the Cotton Bowl.

Every fan in the stands knew Ole Miss had a problem on defense. Cutcliffe had no post-Eli plan. The AD wanted to know how he was going to fix the obvious problem and he didn't have an answer.

Same with Croom, except on the offensive side. And he suffered badly by comparison with Nutt, who has illustrated in less that a year what a difference professional coaching can make on a roster and a program.

 

Nutt's an underrated coach, especially when he performs with not much ... got to be pretty damn dumb not to see it.

 

Nutt's a vastly underrated coach. He's a phony televangelist, but he's a good football coach.

 

One things that's becoming a self fulfilling prophecy is that talented young black assistants feel they have a better shot at advancing in the NFL so they jump there rather than staying in college. Mike Tomlin would have had a great shot at the Cincinnati head coaching job had he chosen to stay there rather than become a pro assistant. It worked out fantastic for him, but who knows how many potential college head coaches it's been less successful for?

 

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of African-American head coaches in the FBS is the same in 2009 as it was in 2008.

 

if running a program into the ground is the same as being a good coach, then yes, nutt is awesome.

 

Well, some people were talking about Mississippi State's search for its next coach, and hiring a pretty successful consulting firm to help in that search. I'd say that's on topic. You're the only one firing insults.

And if you truly think that MSU should not accept a 6- or 7-win season as successful, considering its football history and comparative location, I don't know what to tell you.

 

All you need to know: Mississippi State's last SEC title was in 1941. It has shared one divisional title (1998, SEC West with Arkansas).