When schools hire and misfire (Gregg Doyle CBSSports.com)

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http://cbs.sportsline.com/columns/story/10502423

That's entertainment! When schools hire and misfire

Nov. 29, 2007
By Gregg Doyel
CBSSports.com National Columnist

This is the best time of year in college football, because this is when some of the country's biggest programs make some of the dumbest hires. If you're an unbiased observer it's fascinating and even fun to watch, like when you pass a car accident and see a stray shoe with a foot still inside. Gross and unfortunate, but at the end of the day it's someone else's problem. Which makes it kind of cool.

If you're looking for something gruesome, look at Texas A&M and Ole Miss, the first two schools to hire a new football coach. Texas A&M went with Mike Sherman, also known as Bill Callahan 2.0 -- a fired NFL coach who will fail in the Big 12 job. I love it. Ole Miss picked Houston Nutt, which is gloriously grotesque.

And I like Ole Miss. I was raised in Oxford, Miss., by two Ole Miss employees. The chancellor, Robert Khayat, is a local athletic legend who used to ask me, when I was 8 or 9, if he could have my autograph. Great guy. So is Ole Miss basketball coach Andy Kennedy.

But Ole Miss football coach Houston Nutt? He's a bad guy, and he might even be a bad coach. It's hard to say, because he took turns overachieving and then underachieving at Arkansas, at first from year to year but then more recently from week to week.

What's most baffling about Ole Miss' hiring of Nutt is the speed with which it happened. Nutt resigned from Arkansas on Monday, fleeing from fan pressure, and was hired late that night by Ole Miss. For the Rebels, it was like Urban Meyer or Jim Tressel had become available. Ole Miss wanted to get their guy before someone else snapped him up.

But who would have been that enamored with Houston Nutt? Not the parents of the kids he recruited to Arkansas under shady and even false pretenses. Nutt brought in high school coach Gus Malzahn to get to Malzahn's best prep players, then refused to let Malzahn implement the offense that attracted those players to Arkansas.

Not any respectable BCS program, not so soon after Nutt turned the Arkansas program into a dysfunctional national joke. Maybe in a year or two the stink would have worn off and Nutt could have gotten back into coaching at a place like UTEP. But, no. Within hours he ends up at Ole Miss.

No wonder you're Ole Miss. No disrespect intended, Mr. Khayat. (Nor to you, Andy Kennedy).

As for Texas A&M, it's almost like message boards are running that place. And maybe they are. If you recall, their last school president, Robert Gates, trolled a fan site message board as an anonymous poster. That's a real progressive place, Texas A&M, and believe it or not, I like Texas A&M too. All three of my cousins went there, with the third graduating next month. One of them took care of Reveille for a year. That's a cool school.

But Mike Sherman? That's a bad hire. It makes sense only in the weakest bytes of cyberspace, message boards where fans gather to make their own superficial list of desirable coaching traits -- a former Aggies employee we've all heard of -- and come up with Mike Sherman.

The hire obviously made sense to Texas A&M athletics director Bill Byrne, who said Sherman was the right guy because, among other things, "He understands what the War Hymn means; he understands the spirit of Aggieland."

Sherman knows the words to the school fight song, so the job is his? Terrific. Some day I hope to play poker with Bill Byrne, and I don't like poker. I don't even know how to play.

Sherman knows football, but he doesn't know enough to have this job. He was an offensive line coach at Texas A&M in the 1980s and 1990s? Big deal. He was head coach at Green Bay from 2000-05, and went 57-39? Big deal. Mike Holmgren won a Super Bowl with the Packers. Mike McCarthy could get them there this season. Nobody loses at Green Bay with Brett Favre at quarterback, not even Ray Rhodes -- well, nobody but Mike Sherman, whose 2005 team went 4-12.

Overmatched NFL washout Bill Callahan's spectacular failure at Nebraska doesn't implicitly mean Sherman will do the same at Texas A&M, of course. But it should have scared the people running Texas A&M -- whichever message board they're on -- into looking longer than 48 hours for Dennis Franchione's replacement before giving the job to Mike Sherman.

To Texas A&M's credit, Sherman wasn't the school's first choice. Auburn's Tommy Tuberville was. But when Tuberville decided not to pursue the job, Texas A&M panicked. Kind of like after the 2003 season when Nebraska went after a "name" guy, whiffed, and latched onto Callahan.

If you remember, the name guy Nebraska wanted in 2003 was Houston Nutt.

God help me, I love this time of year.

[Pony Soup]

Nice Post, A+