Nutt made Arkansas football fun again

Arkansas Business, Dec 3, 2007 by Jim Harris

I'M LIKE FRANK BROYLES IN that for at least the next few days, I'm going to look back and enjoy what Houston Nutt accomplished as Arkansas Razorback coach. Broyles on Monday night at Nutt's resignation press conference said Hog fans had gone from a celebration after beating LSU to a "time of mourning." We know some would debate that.

Plenty of fans believe Nutt could have done so much more, that with the best facilities in the Southeastern Conference in place he wasted the opportunity. He wouldn't fight the battles to recruit the most prized recruits in nearby states, and he even tired of the wars in state with league rivals such as Tennessee or Auburn. He lost two games to Southern Cal by a combined 120-31 but, even worse, lost three in-state stars to the Trojans, two that he essentially ran off from Fayetteville.

Plenty of fans believe Nutt never addressed the yearly faults with his program, most especially the kicking game failures in the biggest games. Lost in the excitement of the LSU win on Nov. 23 was that kicking game failures gave LSU great field position several times, but this time the Hogs managed to survive. Even his athletic director, Broyles, told a crowd in Dallas last January that if he were in charge, he'd change out the kicking game coach.

To essentially save his job in December 2005 when fan unrest began to peak, Nutt followed the suggestions from his managers, Broyles and UA board trustee Jim Lindsey, and hired offensive whiz Gus Malzahn from Springdale High School. That saved a dismal recruiting class when Malzahn brought Mitch Mustam, Damian Williams and Ben Cleveland with him. Not willing to cede the credit to others, though, Nutt threw it all away, allowed Malzahn to bolt for a lesser job at Tulsa, lost Mustain and Williams too, and found himself in 2007 right back where he was in early 2005, without an SEC-ready quarterback. And we know well what happened between the 2006 SEC Championship Game and the start of the 2007 season.

All the while Darren McFadden and Felix Jones, the best running back tandem ever to don Hog uniforms, stayed steady, and senior Peyton Hillis regained his form down the stretch, and the Razorbacks delivered a victory for the ages in Baton Rouge.

And Nutt goes out the way he came in, in a blaze of glory. Yes, I'll remember the great moments of the past 10 years.

I'll remember Anthony Lucas taking a pass on the Hogs' first snap of the game against then-nemesis SMU in 1998 and taking it to the house in the sweatbox of War Memorial Stadium, then the Hogs putting a 42-6 hurting on Alabama a week later in Fayetteville, the Tide's worst lost since pre-Bear Bryant days.

I'll remember the thousands of fans wanting to travel to Auburn and Starkville that year, and then to Orlando, Fla., for a bowl game, and Arkansas actually, finally feeling like a real player in the SEC.

By 2007, not only had the Razorbacks long shed the image of the league's ugly and barely welcomed stepchild, they were as formidable as the SEC's traditional Big Six. And by the last game, they were beating the nation's No. 1 team.

That's the legacy Houston Nutt leaves. The rest, a lot of it off the field in the last year, was unfortunate and was his undoing, as it irreparably fractured the fan base.

Now, a new coach must keep Arkansas among the SEC players and bring the fans back together, the same way they felt through Houston Nutt's early years. He'll face a league where at least six teams expect to win 10 games a year and the other five dream mightily about it. He'll have to face the fact that the state produces a Darren McFadden about once in 20 years, and that Nutt hasn't recruited well in a couple of years. It's starting over in more ways than one.

But there is good history behind it all. If Nutt didn't fully restore Arkansas football to the age in which it mattered nationally, he at least made it fun.

ON THE WEB

More dim Harris columns are available at ArkansasSports360.com.