Coaches have an uncanny knack for seizing the obvious and ridding it like a prized thoroughbred making the final turn for home in the Kentucky Derby.
Houston Nutt managed to do that on a recent interview on The Sports Animal in Knoxville with Jimmy Hyams.
“He’s had a pretty nice little honeymoon,” Nutt said during that interview, per Hyams’ article on Gridiron Now. “I’m an Arkansan, born and raised there. They got after me pretty hard and we won three Western titles and went to Atlanta twice.
“So it’s, ‘What have you done lately?’”
Well, he’s actually correct on that. Some Arkansas fans aren’t going to like it, but then by 2007 if Houston had walked down the Arkansas River to Little Rock, the headlines and talking heads would have said “Houston Can’t Swim.”
What the national click-bait writers are doing is trying to paint the story as Nutt putting Bret Bielema on the hot seat.
They apparently haven’t been following or they would have known he was there from about midway through the fourth quarter of the loss at Missouri with some of the fans.
“He’s 10-22 in the SEC,” Nutt said, per Hyams on Gridiron Now. “So they’re going to look at that hard. He’s going to a bowl. That’s a good thing. … But they’re going to get restless like everybody else.
“We’re in a world where everybody wants to win. They pay you a great salary. All they want you to do is win yesterday. So you’ve got to win.”
Some say everybody other than Alabama is simply playing to make it to the Sugar Bowl, unless it’s part of the College Football Playoff.
And that may be true, too.
However, there is a segment of the Hogs’ fan base that are tired of what they call mediocrity.
Which may be the best Bielema can accomplish.
