Nutt Feeling Pressure

As the 2011 Ole Miss Rebels football season comes to a close, many questions will carry on into the off-season. The Rebel football team must win their final four games of the regular season to become bowl eligible for the first time since 2009. Those games will include traveling to play the Kentucky Wildcats, at home versus Louisiana Tech and the number one ranked team in the country in LSU and finally traveling to Starkville to face the Bulldogs of Mississippi State.

A major obstacle head coach Houston Nutt will have to endure at the beginning of the off-season, if not sooner, is the fact that his job is in major jeopardy. Nutt has an overall record of 24-22 with Ole Miss. That number doesn’t seem concerning, but if you look at the Rebels season last season and this season, the records are significantly different. Nutt’s record as head coach since the 2009 football campaign is 6-14. More importantly, Nutt has 11 straight Southeastern Conference (SEC) football games, which has never happened before since Ole Miss started playing football in the SEC in 1932.

Senior defensive tackle Justin Smith talked about the coaching rumors.




“I’ve heard rumors, but you really can’t pay attention to them,” Smith said. “I don’t really take much I hear at face value. I’m not sure if coaching is the issue, but I’m not sure that it’s not. It’s just really hard to say.”

Smith was one of the first players recruited by Nutt when Nutt arrived at Ole Miss and is one of the only players that have been coached by Nutt for all four years while at Ole Miss. He feels he’s seen a difference this year compared to others.

“I think there’s been some difference this year from the previous three seasons,” Smith said. “After last season the coaches felt that there was a sense of entitlement and lack of leadership. There was a sense that some of us were spoiled. So, they’ve been a little tougher on us this year.”

Smith said that the coaches continue to preach the same principles after a 2-6 start as they did before the season began.

“It’s another opportunity to go out and get a W,” Smith said. “We’re over the moral victories and coming close. We want a win. We need a win.”

But the question still remains: does Nutt have enough tricks in the bag to salvage a disappointing season? If the season isn’t salvaged, will he kept his job based mostly on his early success at Ole Miss? Success, in which, a lot of fans around Ole Miss feel was in due part because of Ed Orgeron, the previous head coach before Nutt.

Orgeron was fired after his third season of coaching the Rebels. His ability to motivate and recruit captured some fans, but his lack of wins or close “moral victories” eventually was a key reason for him getting fired. Orgeron held a record of 12-27 while coaching at Ole Miss, which is glaringly worse than that of Nutt.


But, as stated early, the problem some fans have had with Nutt recently are his last two seasons, which were heavily players he recruited, not Orgeron. During the “Orgeron Era,” Orgeron was notorious for being a great recruiter and evaluator of talent. Orgeron was even featured in Bruce Feldman’s book Meat Market. Orgeron’s aggressive tactics won high caliber players over. One of Orgeron’s more popular recruiting sayings came when he was a five star caliber player in Joe McKnight, “His tape is better than Reggie's (Reggie Bush, former USC running back and now Miami Dolphin running back) high school tape. If he comes to Oxford, we'll change the bricks on Manning Way to McKnight Way."

One reason Nutt’s performance had dropped over the past couple of years deals with players that have either been kicked off the Ole Miss team or transferred because of playing time. Highly recruited players: Pat Patterson, Tig Barksdale, Clarence Jackson, Tony Grimes, Rodney Scott and Brandon Sanders are a few players that made it to campus, played and eventually were kicked off the team for breaking team rules.

“We’ve lost a lot of players because they’ve got into trouble,” Smith said. “In the long run, that really starts to hurt a team.”

Blake Embry, an unbiased fan of football and none Ole Miss fan, weighed in about the Ole Miss coaching situation. Embry played college baseball at Mississippi College and understands athletics.

Embry felt the biggest problem with the Rebels right now was “lack of talent” and a shift of veteran players to that of younger guys having to take more leadership roles.

“The last two years Ole Miss hasn’t had that good base of players like they had two years ago,” Embry said. “ In my opinion, I feel Nutt should deserve one more year. Yeah, it’s a struggle this year but maybe next year could be a different story.”

Embry gave Nutt’s coaching performance so far of the 2011 season a C. “The reason I don’t go lower is because they have a lot of younger players. They’re having to deal with a lot of young and that’s tough.”

But like others, Embry is a fan of college football and he realizes “most Ole Miss fans don’t want to hear excuses.”

And he was highly alarmed when players on the football staff had “doubt” in their responses about Nutt.

“You hope to hear your players are saying we’re being put in the best position to win,” Embry said. “It’s kind of scary when a player would say that. Makes me wonder if Houston still has control of the locker room and this team or is it starting to swing the other way.”

The season isn’t over yet. That is a fact. Ole Miss could win out or lose out. But these next four games seem to becoming more and more critical for Nutt, his staff and the future of the Ole Miss football program.