The light bulb finally goes on for Muschamp: New South Carolina and former Florida football coach Will Muschamp told my pal Tony Barnhart of gridiron.now that “I probably made a mistake at Florida trying to change schematically from what they had done before. . . you have to adapt to what your kids can do.”
Wonder when Muschamp, who was 29-21 overall and 17-15 in four seasons at Florida from 2011 to 2014, was hit with this lightning bolt revelation?
Was it when he hired his second offensive coordinator or his third?
Muschamp’s admission is a bit shocking, because you continuously hear from new head coaches that they should adapt to the personnel around them until they can recruit the personnel they need to run their desired system.
Case in point comes from Urban Meyer, Muschamp’s Florida predecessor: When Meyer took over the Gators in 2005, he discovered his spread option offense didn’t fit starting QB Chris Leak. So he fit his offense to what Leak could do. In Meyer’s second year in 2006, Leak guided Florida to the BCS national championship, getting help from true freshman backup QB Tim Tebow who ran some of Meyer’s spread option.
When Tebow took over as the starter in 2007, Meyer was able to use the spread option almost exclusively. In 2008, Meyer won his second national title.
Take a deep breath, Hugh: When Hugh Freeze was hired as Ole Miss football coach in 2012 after just one year of FBS head coaching experience at Arkansas State, one of the first things he had to learn is everybody starts throwing knifes at you if you quickly flip a losing program.
His recruiting class of 2013, which now features three possible first-round NFL draft picks in next month’s draft, made the speedy transformation to a nationally ranked team with two straight New Year’s Six bowl dates.
It has also brought out the NCAA investigators, who have been poking and prodding the Rebels for the last several months. Ole Miss was supposedly turned in to the NCAA by one of the West Division teams that it has beaten at least twice in Freeze’s four years in Oxford.
Freeze recently said at the Ole Miss pro day that the investigation is like “a four-year colonoscopy.”
If that’s the way Freeze feels, here’s my advice for him the next time he has to talk to an NCAA investigator: Close your eyes, stay perfectly still and mentally put yourself in a happy place.
Works every time.
Stall ball: It looked like the NCAA men’s basketball tournament selection committee giving Vanderbilt the gift of an invitation as one of the last teams in the 68-team field had saved Commodores’ coach Kevin Stallings job.
And even that invite was in question because sources told me that the person that makes the travel arrangements for NCAA tournament teams had actually called South Carolina, told the Gamecocks they had been invited, then said to hold on and they would call back in 10 minutes.
South Carolina never got the return call. Vandy got the NCAA bid and then promptly lost by 20 points to Wichita State in one of the tourney’s First Four games in Dayton.
Maybe that loss put Stallings, who had been to seven NCAA tourneys in 17 seasons at Vandy, in the frame of mind that he’d better beat the disgruntled mob out-of-town.
Thanks to former Vandy athletic director Todd Turner, who hired Stallings at Vandy and who happened to be the CEO of the search firm that was helping Pittsburgh find a replacement for head coach Jamie Dixon, Stallings found a golden parachute in the form of six-year contract from Pitt. Dixon left Pitt to replace former LSU coach Trent Johnson as TCU’s coach after Johnson was fired.
Who Vandy hires in anybody’s guess, but the university is using former Vandy head basketball coach Eddie Fogler as a consultant.
Stealing Rick Byrd from Belmont College, almost next door to the Vandy campus, is an obvious choice. He has a 639-323 record and seven NCAA tournament appearances in 30 seasons at Belmont.
Byrd is 60 years old and probably has at least another decade on his coaching tred.
But if Vandy wants to skew younger, then it should go for Valparaiso fifth-year head coach Bryce Drew. The 41-year old Drew, a Baton Rouge native and son of former LSU assistant basketball coach Homer Drew, is 123-48 in five seasons at Valparaiso, including four Horizon League regular season and two tournament championships, two NCAA tournament trips and two NIT appearances including a finals date Thursday night against George Washington.
